> Not the brilliant engineers you imagine are going to run it.
I have no doubts brilliant European engineers are going to work on the hard problems of shipping a next gen chip process and design... In America!
What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to be directly paid as engineering salaries. Of course they won't: that would reduce the piece of the pie of all the non-technical managers and bureaucrats!
> What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to be directly paid as engineering salaries.
I mean, that's exactly what they do. Any company with good finances can apply for support for R&D to develop new features or tech that they would otherwise not develop or invest in. This comes in the form of direct contributions to employees' salaries listed in the grant application.
I've written and defended these grants for multiple companies and I have been on the receiving end of them, too.
This isn't even specific to this deal, this is just something you can always do, along with literally hundreds of EU and state level support programs.
That's an understandable reaction if you just look at the raw USD value, but that's very far from the full picture. They are not pitiful when you start adding the costs for housing, healthcare, transportation and the rest of the things that you need to live. Compared to the huge wage increase, the increase in living standard is very minor (and in some regards worse, e.g. the amount of time you lose daily to the car centric infrastructure).
The number and quality of available jobs in the SV region was a much bigger factor to everyone I've spoken to that moved from the EU.
They still are pretty pitiful across Europe even after that, compared to Canada and Australia as well as the US.
In the UK the problem seems to be the company owner/manager class see software people roughly the same as any other office worker, rather than as skilled producers of products. As a result they pay peanuts, and then are surprised when they get less than stellar results. Not sure what the reason might be elsewhere, but across the rest of the continent the pay seems even worse.
>That's an understandable reaction if you just look at the raw USD value, but that's very far from the full picture. They are not pitiful when you start adding the costs for housing, healthcare, transportation and the rest of the things that you need to live.
And that’s not even specific to tech salaries. A typical Bay Area TC of $250-400k for a senior engineer will also include great healthcare so there is basically no competition in any European location.
You have to specifically want to live in a European city for the culture/walkability/etc or else there is just no reason to take tech jobs there.
> A typical Bay Area TC of $250-400k for a senior engineer will also include great healthcare
Notionally, yes, but in reality it will be the same blighted hellscape of insurance denials, out-of-network complexity, and lack of consistency as everyone else's healthcare in America. You can hire someone to help you navigate it, which is a remarkable economic construct.
You have actually addressed the actual issue here but from wrong perspective.
Culture is the issue here. EU tries to live, USA tries to earn. If the only thing that interests you is money then yes, probably USA is the right direction. Of all the people that I know that went working outside of their country, they were mostly going to EU companies (or USA companies in Europe), sometimes to the Asia. None left for USA. On the other side I know a CTO that left USA for Europe and bought a small property in France where he lives with whole family.
This shows very well in environmental laws, gdpr, protection of workers, actually having friends, nature, having hill-climbing organizations that aren't only lobist groups to be actually allowed to climb the mountains, public transport, able to drink spring water in center of capital city, most people working 40h/week max, actually do use their vacations in one piece, free education, maternity leave measured in years not months (yes under a year too but not month or two),...
So it depends on the personal cultural preference. Some people just love the money and things they can buy with it, maybe even power that it brings and surely a lot of such people are also in EU. The difference is in the percentage of population although Hollywood did great job at exporting the view of world trough money glasses.
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Regarding the topic. EU was quite satisfied with buying processors from the States, it was also happy with using Windows, Android, Apple thing. The problem is, as in every other thing, USA corporations became vampires that wants to eat you alive from pure greed and systemic addiction to blood (endless growth).
It has become imperative to produce our own processors as you can no longer trust USA or China to not shovel inside some spying equipment. Well the times have changed and it is no longer an option to buy it from USA/China, so EU has moved forward and dont worry, we will have our own chips our own phones and operating system (linux, sailfish or something else...).
EU is an elephant and it needs a lot of coordination of muscles to move its legs but once it starts moving...
I am sorry, I would love to just use the USA/China products and not re-develop hardware (based on what we know now, maybe not dragging 40 years old anchor of previous development with me), not having a need for GDPR, but they have both just screwed everything up from pure greed. Now we need to fix it and a lot of time and resources will have to go that way. But we will eventually fix it.
>Of all the people that I know that went working outside of their country, they were mostly going to EU companies (or USA companies in Europe), sometimes to the Asia. None left for USA. On the other side I know a CTO that left USA for Europe and bought a small property in France where he lives with whole family.
Meanwhile (since 2012) Trump happened, race unrest's, police brutality, corona handling fiasco, Google/FB/Amazon public image is going down, USA public depth has roughly doubled [1] and general perception of USA has changed (to the worse[2]), China is hiring, student depth is going trough the roof (and immigrants want to have children someday), no one believes in "war on terror" any more (talking about EU), Snowden, war on privacy,...
This graph is outdated, did you find some that is up to date? Also interesting one would be how many of those in 2012 survey stayed and where.
I see that you deleted your further attempt to mock my presenting statistics in exchange for your anecdotes (I had no idea until reading your contributions here that that in the US there is no "actually having friends, nature, having hill-climbing organizations that aren't only lobist groups to be actually allowed to climb the mountains").
But since you did bring up Germany with the deleted mention of Operation Paperclip, I suggest you read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25367731 , in which @bildung and I discuss German migration to the US over the past 30 years (including 2019 data).
>This graph is outdated, did you find some that is up to date?
I provided statistics in response to your anecdotes. The onus is on you, not me, to prove that a) your anecdotes are actually representative of broader trends, and b) my statistics are, in fact, outdated.
You can get the walkability side in any of northeastern cities such as NYC, Boston, and to a lesser extent D.C. Pay is comparable to the Bay given the cost of living difference.
Comparable is generally not true - the difference is maybe ~$30k at best in DC vs. the Bay Area for example, but DC compensation is nowhere near what you can get in the Bay Area. The only thing in the US that beats it it seems is NYC area finance (i.e. hedge funds).
There's a catch, though: You have to live in the borderline failed state that is the USA. That's quite the drawback and just not worth it no matter the salary increase, imo.
"Disposable income per capita" is certainly a number, but it's not actually meaningful in this context for a few reasons:
1. "Disposable income per capita" is irrelevant to normal people, as it does not account for how equally that wealth is actually spread. If the top 1% double their income and the rest halves it, that's still a net increase in "disposable income".
2. "Disposable income" does not at all account for the varying amount of cost required to sustain a given standard of living in different regions, even within a country.
3. "Disposable income" is a purely economic measure. As such, it does not measure a large amount things that impact your quality of life, like time off, stress, job satisfaction, etc. A quick look at those non-economic measures will show those high economic measures don't come for free.
Honestly, I looked into this for myself a few years ago. I always hear this health care, holidays cost of living argument. It just doesn't add up. Europe's salaries are just too low.
Global purchase power is a very limited and 100% american way to assess work compensation. In europe we don't care only about the number but about many other factors.
Yet tech salaries in Vancouver combined with real estate values make it so that most tech jobs are barely living wage, at least when my partner and I tried hard to make it work some years ago. Even with universal health care (which wasn't quite what they have) it couldn't possibly make up the difference for someone with college debt.
I'd argue that if you got a CS degree from an American college you're probably just forced to work in the US simply because the other prospective employees can accept a lower salary due to a lower debt load. Maybe the best of the best can find a way to earn American salaries overseas but I really don't think that's as common as the HN crowd might assume.
The situation in Vancouver is caused by out of control immigration quotas. Real estate there is a way to park assets in a safe jurisdiction.
Seattle has a much healthier market both for devs and real estate and is only three hours away.
Only difference in healthcare is while american top devs get it on top of their compensation packages, canadians pay for it with their prohibitive income tax rates. It's pretty easy to take the total spending percentage that goes to healthcare and multiply it by your income tax to see how much a dev is really paying for healthcare.
I don't think Vancouver is as bad as you make it out to be. No, you will not make the same money here as in Seattle, it's often something like a 1/3rd pay cut. That is not a bad income however, it is easily enough to rent and whilst real estate in Vancouver proper may be expensive there is reliable transit and property in the other cities such as Burnaby, Richmond, Coquitlam etc is significantly less expensive.
I'm also not quite sure what you mean with your point about healthcare. MSP premiums were eliminated last year [0], there is now no charge to access medical care. Prescriptions, dental and eye care are all still chargeable, though prescriptions at least are essentially capped through BC Fair Pharmacare [1].
Compared to the US, Canada is much easier for immigration as a tech worker. One can get PR (equivalent of a green card) before landing if they have a sufficient points score, in BC that's fairly easy through the tech PNP [2] and a willing employer.
Additionally Vancouver consistently ranks among the top 10 most liveable cities [3].
>What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to be directly paid as engineering salaries. Of course they won't: that would reduce the piece of the pie of all the non-technical managers and bureaucrats!
This is what China's doing: offering double salaries to Japanese and Taiwanese engineers to lure them away, because tech salaries in Japan and Taiwan are quite low by global standards (even lower than China's).
If someone tried doing that in Poland:
- there would be a huge (and proper imho) outrage - why not teachers, or nurses
- every job would be registered as a programming job ;)
this would be the case in most european countries mainly because of the difference in culture in regards to working and the role of making money in society.
It is not necessarily a bad thing either in my opinion.
A lot of americans seem so focussed on making money, instead of caring for others around them.
I have no doubts brilliant European engineers are going to work on the hard problems of shipping a next gen chip process and design... In America!
What the EU should do is earmark some of that money to be directly paid as engineering salaries. Of course they won't: that would reduce the piece of the pie of all the non-technical managers and bureaucrats!