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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

As a British person, I'm very happy working for North American companies, but it's a bit of a shame that I have to do that to find interesting and reasonably paid work with pleasant conditions. I wish we could generate our own companies with the initiative and ambition of those in North American to do meaningful computer science work. Nobody seems to even be trying.

(Don't try to suggest ARM is an option - their pay is really uncompetitive.)

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It's not just ARM, many European companies don't pay well. Especially for engineers and developers.

In Europe you have to be management to get payed anything substantial. Though most management is still doing the jobs which any engineer could combine with their work and probably do equally well or better.

> many European companies don't pay well. Especially for engineers and developers.

You have to take into account the fact that in Europe the state takes a big chunk of your gross salary (probably around 50%) in form of social contributions and other taxes, to cover things like healthcare, unemployment, pension, welfare, parental leave and so on. In the US you have to cover these things yourself most of the time.

So while most people praise the European system they would like at the same time to earn as much as their US counterparts, which is unrealistic tbh. As the saying goes, "you can't have your cake and..."

I think you're misunderstanding - we mean 'many European companies don't pay as well as North American companies even when they are also employing you in Europe'. So that tax is the same and you can directly compare and it is egregious.

Yeah, misunderstood that.

That doesn't cover the difference. In the US the pay for a median software engineer is slightly above $100k. In the UK, Germany, and France it is half that and most likely less than half for the UK and France.

> hough most management is still doing the jobs which any engineer could combine with their work and probably do equally well or better.

If engineers could do it better, why don't they?

Because they like engineering?

If you won't volunteer to do a job then don't criticise those who do.

Since it's the person you would replace which decides your faith. So yes, it would be better, and most I know would probably like to, but won't be allowed in any way to "meddle with management business".

Management won’t let you. They probably won’t even hire you in the first place.

Some great companies cough airbus cough won’t pay you or consider hiring you unless you have a degree from a prestigious place. And if you tell HR you are not interested in being a manager but stay an engineer they won’t even hire you. Most people in the company produce Word and PowerPoint documents, not code.

> Don't try to suggest ARM is an option - their pay is really uncompetitive.

Off-topic but: Is that so? For some reason I always thought they were on par with the American high-paying companies.

I'm probably exaggerating in my memory, but I think I recall seeing an internship offer from ARM that was the same daily rate as Oracle were offering hourly.

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