They get 7 weeks paid vacation a year.

Stuff like New Years, January first, Easter and Christmas as well as a range of other national holidays is considered paid leave.

They get paid sick leave with no questions asked for the first 3 days, then a follow up on day 3 and 7 and an actual meeting on day 14.

They get paid leave on their child’s first two sick days, per child.

If they have children under 3 they get 2-4 days of paid leave a year per child to spend quality time with them.

If they are older than 55-60 they get a suited amount of time off each year ranging from 4 days a year to one day each week. At 4 days it’s paid leave, at one day a week they are only paid for a 34 hour week (down from 37).

They work 37 hour weeks. Have flexible hours and can to work from home when it fits their schedule.

They get $4000 worth of paid education a year + paid days to actually take it. The $4000 doesn’t sound like that much, but it’s enough to cover 2 university courses of around 20 ECTS.

Good luck attracting them. :)

Starts at 23k5 EUR, goes up to 40k EUR per year, if you keep it up for 20+ years (note: it is only this "high" if you're on a full time scholarship. The average, even though the universities hide this fact, is 20% or so lower, mostly because there's more than a few that "aren't full time". In reality not working full time as an assistant is a stupid piece of fiction: that simply does not happen, although it is true that you really do have much flexibility if you do well)

Engineers in public service make around 30% more in theory, but pay more taxes. In reality they make the same amount of money.

If you get promoted to professor, you start at 40k, tops out at 70k. You can make more, but not spectacularly more, by becoming a university administrator.

In Silicon valley, pay for someone who knows javascript starts at 95k USD (75k EUR, 5% more than a university administrator with 20+ years of experience), and tops out at 5x that. Needless to say, if you can be a university professor, you are very likely to be a great engineer, you should be able to quickly make it to 300k pay, but even if you don't, you're still making a lot more.

Good luck retaining these people. One of the leading AI researchers, Pieter Abbeel, is one of the people who seems to have made the choice not to be retained.

I also have lots of anecdotal evidence that seems to indicate this is in fact what is happening. The brain drain from Europe is once again at or exceeding what it was in 2000: people are getting whisked away before they even graduate, and it's once again getting ridiculous : people get whisked away even before the last year.

The pay is also for actual engineers with a candidate degree. It’s around $40000-$50000 + a 15% pension if your education is only academy or bachelor level.

Here in Finland the figure you referred (86k$) would be equivalent to director level pay in the public side. An engineer with the package you described would be above average in compensation here. We get 4 to 6 weeks of paid vacation.

The average wage in software engineering here is around 40k$ - 57k$ (i.e more or less what you referred). In software engineering, depending on the employer, the degree does not necessarily affect compensation though. Top of the line engineers are well compensated (in the Finnish scale) regardless of their degree.

Of course, Finland is not strictly geographically speaking part of Scandinavia (although it is a nordic country) :)

In fact most people I know in Denmark don’t break the €55k (converted from DKK) salary, experience also has very little effect on your salary so you aren’t going to double or more your salary over the life time of your career.

You also forget to mention the tax rate you pay.