Same for us, finance has slightly above average comp packages especially the bonus but in London it’s possible to get to 100K as an engineer outside of it it begins to drop drastically some tech hubs can have high salaries but Manchester for example tops out at around 80K and that’s also pretty hard to get.

Outside of the UK you might be lucky to get €50-60K even when working for US firms on average this includes Germany.

Some Nordic countries have higher salaries but the CoL is pretty steep.

Overall if you don’t include taxes it’s possible to get competitive salaries in the UK and some parts of Europe once you take into account income tax and VAT you’ll the race isn’t nearly as close anymore.

Also startups do not pay well at all and equity is nearly unheard off even for single digit non-founder employees.

CoL?

Seriously here in Norway getting over 100K € annually is becoming normal. If you are really talented, then you can even make 150k € annually. Freelancers make over 200k € annually. There is a huge shortage for developers these days, much thanks to "digital transformation" trend.

According to SSB, the 75th percentile for full-time system architects in private industry (the highest paid software developer category) in Norway in 2017 was $103K/year. This is close to the 50th percentile for all software engineers in US in 2017, which was $104K according to BLS. The 50th percentile for system architects in Norway was $87K.

Norway has a higher cost of living due to the 25% VAT, and because the national (non-developer) median salary is so high. Not to mention vehicle and gasoline taxes.

Have you looked at the exchange rate to euros? That's 1M NOK. I think maybe you meant $, which would be 800K NOK, which sounds correct for Oslo.

The tax and cost of living in the Nordic countries is pretty steep even compared to the rest of Europe.