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Comment by zenovision | Hacker News Reader

Salaries in Europe are also very low for software developers. In Germany you will make on average 50-60K euro per year as a senior software developer. After tax this is less than 3000 euro per month. Similar situation in the UK. This is the reason why not a single company from Europe reached the TOP-10 in the world by market cap. Talents are moving away from Europe. According to news I read, 140000 people leaving Germany each year, especially people with high qualification.

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You have to take into account the different workload and priorities. The average annual rate of hours worked in Germany is 1300 hours roughly. In the US it's 1800 hours, eclipsing even Japan. That's more than three full months of additional work.

Germans usually express a preference for long-term stable employment and work-life balance rather than skyrocketing salaries. The same is true for a lot of European countries.

Keep in mind that the "official" work hours reported in Japan are bogus because many Japanese workers do not report overtime, nor do they report the hours they feel obligated to spend with their team after work hours.

Work-life balance for software engineers is a bit better in the US than it is in Japan.

No way you can use 1300 hours average to compare with 50~60K average salary.

I just assume you took this number off the OECD chart which explicitly states that you can't compare between countries because they have different methods of evaluating the numbers. (Ironically I have only seen country-comparisons from this data)

You won't get anywhere near 1300 hours without counting all part-time, half-time workers who obviously don't get the full salary. The standard is 40 hours per week (37.5 if generous) with 30 days of paid vacation. That is 1700+ hours per year.

175k even if you refer to the study "International Mobil" using 2009-2013 timefame [1]. 140k of those come back, they calculate 25k Germans net leaving per year. 70% are high qualified. The study says salary is not the main factor [2]. The 25k are offset by equal immigration from other EU countries [3]

1] https://www.wiwo.de/politik/deutschland/warum-deutsche-auswa... 2] https://www.wiwo.de/politik/deutschland/deutsche-auswanderer... 3] https://www.focus.de/finanzen/news/arbeitsmarkt/mehr-abwande...

You also pay less for rent, less for food, less for your internet bill, less for your phone bill than in America.

In the end if you live in SF vs Germany you might earn twice as much, but you spend 3 times as much. In Seattle it's maybe a better factor, but that's one of the few places with worse weather than Germany.

And then you have to account for 4 weeks less vacation, no paid overtime (or overtime as time off). I usually do two 3 week vacations a year and 2 weeks over Christmas. It's not only pay that counts.

The amazing thing is, it appears, that they still manage to get people from the US. A significant portion of my Linkedin spam is coming from EU/UK recruiters who evidently believe they have a chance to poach people from here. I figure they would not have been doing this if there were no takers.

And terribly expensive rents, at least in big cities like Munich. Many engineers would like to move to US, but it’s much harder than to move to some other less expensive place within EU.

I know more developers who would laugh at the idea of going to the US than wanting to go to the US. (Mostly qol reasons.)

And rents are still far away from the likes of SF/NYC/Seattle.

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