Because in the EU there are no visa restrictions for importing foreign workers like in the US.
EU companies can secure working visas to almost anyone outside the EU in a couple of months so instead of raising salaries to attract local talent they know it's a much better deal to pay a recruiter and wait to find an outsider desperate for a job or a sucker who doesn't know the market/living costs.
Do you think SV salaries would be as high as they are if the US would have unrestricted immigration and give working visas to anyone who fit the job description?
I find that (the negative reaction to them here on HN) hilarious when it comes to RSUs of a publicly traded company such as Google and Facebook. They are absolutely unequivocally every bit as real as your salaries. Maybe it's just that people outside SV don't really understand the difference between options and RSUs. Before I came to SV I had never even heard of RSUs.
So we must not throw away the skills factor, the ability of employees to build an extremely successful company, their motivations, their awareness of new business practices, although it is very difficult to measure it. Perhaps France is ahead (after all, a lot of Linux is European, along with DailyMotion and others), perhaps it is not (...after all, DailyMotion only got the second seat and is now dwarfed by Youtube).
My brother in law moved to Silicon Valley because he had a very low salary ceiling in Vienna.
UK salaries are a joke, but you can make good money contracting and consulting.
It's definitely a more complicated way of working than being salaried, but it's rewarding, both monetarily and in the ability to set your own vacation allowances, take big gaps between contracts if you want to/can afford to etc etc.
If you want decent pay in London you go contract, not perm, and head for the finance sector. You can make the equivalent of $150k-280k depending on how good you are at landing contracts and selling yourself.
AFAICT the situation is similar in western Europe (I get feelers out sometimes at lower but comparable rates for contract work in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Belgium).
Perm workers here are being ripped off IMHO, massively. But then the technical standard of the average perm worker at the average mid sized company in the UK is terrible too. It's a vicious feedback cycle of low pay, low respect for the profession and poor results. Perm work in mainland Europe is paid peanuts AFAICT, which is probably why so many find their way to London.
Some of this difference is down to costs and rights associated with work in the EU, which are just missing in the US. And part of the reason contracting is so lucrative is that we effectively opt-out of those.
If I were to take on this work through my Ltd company it would translate to a salary equivalent of around £101,000 or $130,000 US. What you actually get out of it probably depends on your exact tax situation I guess!
Most of the work in Austria that comes my way seems to be embedded systems or kernel work, though one or two are Java related.
Would you mind sharing some, maybe in private?
More generally I've been wondering about this and can't figure it out, why are software engineer salaries in Europe are so much lower than the US? From what I can tell, Switzerland is just about the highest you'll see in Europe, and is still lower than the biggest US tech hubs. In other big metropolitan areas (Paris, London, etc.), the cost of living is at least a bit lower, but they're still major cities and not that cheap. And there salaries for engineers are even lower. As another concrete data point I was looking through the gitlab location adjustments for remote workers that they have released publicly[0], and the floor for anywhere in the US, meaning even the most inexpensive, remote parts in the country, is 63.3% of the baseline SF salary. Any mid-tier city will be higher than that, like 75% of the SF salaries. But Paris only pays 56.5% of the SF baseline. Why is that?
[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/blob/master/dat...