I grew up in Eastern Europe and moved to Western Europe in my early 20s and the difference is that in the East, STEM was very popular for kids in high school and university as it offered access to engineering careers which were the most lucrative considering how poor the economy was in the 90s, helping kids of lower class background move upwards(just like in the US) and it would also open doors later in life to emigrate to the West.

Now in Western Europe, due to socialism and high standard of living, kids aren't that poor and tech salaries are not that much higher than any other desk job so they have no interest to study STEM as it's seen as stressful career path for boring lonely nerds and instead prefer to focus on social sciences, being wantrepreneurs or Instagram influencers.

Not sure, what western european countries pays as much for a tech job as for any other desk job? Also i dont think it has something to do with skills, more like with criminals creating virii and thus developing and understanding of how security works.

Outside the SV bubble law, accounting, banking, medicine, general management etc all pay higher than programming, with less stress, more job security and higher prestige (if that matters to you).

Not really. Devs in the uk earn far more than most of these jobs you mentioned. Perhaps you are working with the wrong company.

There is quite a large difference between tech salaries depending on nationality of the company, their approach to tech and location in the UK.

A Principal Software Engineer in the South East can make six figures easily, the same in the midlands will be much less, and that's only 90 miles apart.

That's a huge wage differential for a country the size of Michigan

Yes ... but remember as well we don't have the "commute many miles" mentality, you tend to work fairly local to where you live.

I might be an outlier, I live 55 miles away from work (1h15m commute each way) so that I can have a higher salary, but much bigger house, better transport links, good schools for the kids etc.

Here in Italy that's very common during your first years, especially if you're not living in a big city like Milan.

As another Czech person and former PM of another security product I guess there are two main factors in play:

1. Tech factor: amount of HW and SW what could be exported into Eastern bloc was very limited so people who worked with computers were all very confortable with low level work as getting anything else than bare computer was almost impossible.

2. Business factor: there was close to 0 money available in Easter bloc (= 40 years of comunism destroyed all personal equity as all property from previous generation was confiscated and your earning potential was very limited) so when you started software company you needed sales channel that didn't require much hand holding. Antiviruses are great because you could use listings on download sites and the product is culture agnostic.

In US your best bet in 90s was to create consumer or enterprise SW company. But imagine being in Czech republic: you don't understand the US culture to get into home of people and you don't have access to capital and institutional knowledge to build enterprise SW (no way you was going to afford opening US office on money availale in this region). But hey, no problem writing AV software, then upload it to download.com and then collect payments.

Also those AV companies took so long to take off: Avast was created in late 80s and it took them around 15 years to get any traction. Being in region with more opportunities you probably give up and try something else.

It could be also that a lot of white-collar and intellectual cybercriminals are located in those countries.