In pretty much all of the EU, even in expensive cities like Stockholm or Dublin, if you earn a salary of €100,000, you can live a pretty decent life. Heck even on €50,000, you can do well in a lot of places.

Good luck doing the same in any of the top 10 most expensive cities in the US.

Define "decent".

In the top tier cities in western EU countries, buying even a modest apartment that will house a small family will be a challenge on €100k (pre-tax!). It is certainly doable, but you will not be able to afford any other luxuries.

I would consider Paris a top-tier city, and while none of my friends make more than 100k, half of us bought our house already (we're all late 20s, early 30s, with a few kids starting to pop-up).

If you make 80k€[1] pre-tax in Paris (that's a good salary for SWE here), you can borrow more than 300k€. For a couple, that means buying a 700k€ flat/house, you can even live in the middle of Paris for that price! And we're talking about one of the most expensive city in Europe, with a massive housing bubble since 2000 (where the price was 2.74 times lower, adjusted for the evolution of salaries[2]).

In Europe, you are affluent with less than 100k€.

[1]: I'm talking about «super brut», which is how much money you cost to your employer, not the «brut» which appears on your working contract (which would be around 57k€ in this example)

[2] https://stymaar.fr/net/Capture%20du%202021-01-14%2012-11-55...., source Jacques Friggit (http://www.cgedd.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/prix-immobili...)

And it's not only Google.

100k will also not put you in the 1% of the earners if you consider the cities where the high paying jobs are.

In any case, the point is that with €100k/year you can really have way more than a decent life. More like a very, very comfortable life.

These salaries are also possible in Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Mannheim, Heidelberg (and more, this is where I know)

> In any case, the point is that with €100k/year you can really have way more than a decent life. More like a very, very comfortable life.

Well so what? They shouldnt pay more because it is already a decent salary and give the rest to the share holders?

It's no wonder that avarage salaries are low if people approach salary negotiations with this kind of attitude.

It's funny, because my father in law (French, but who spent quite some times living in the US) often says the opposite: “Americans don't value property ownership. That's because they have wooden houses that last for a few decades and get replaced, while in Europe we buy stone that last for centuries”.

Clichés are clichés.

UK is in Europe btw ;)

It's not required to own, sure, but it increases your comfort level significantly.

This list would suggest that there are many countries in Europe with a higher home ownership rate than the US, the UK or Australia. Surely that says something about valuing it.

If you want to raise a family in SF proper, I agree that 100k/yr total income would be insufficient for what most people consider a reasonable QoL, even if one spouse stayed at home to take care of the children to avoid childcare costs.

Of course, in SF, 100k/yr is "entry-level engineer at an early stage startup" territory in terms of earnings, which is not the typical profile of someone trying to raise children. You'd have to be trying really hard to not make double that as a mid-level engineer in the Bay, though.

Keep in mind that even once you get past the flashy comp numbers at FAANG, there are a huge number of publicly-traded tech companies in the Bay which pay enough that you could afford a mortgage to buy a house in SF on a single engineer's earnings without breaking 35% of post-tax take home pay. (A bit of a stretch at 200k, easy at 250k.) Even startups are getting there: a friend of mine recently got a new job in the Bay (not in SF, but close) paying over 200k in cash comp (base + bonus) with less than 5 years of experience, plus some options (which are probably not worthless, but can't immediately be used to pay a mortgage). He's a good engineer but this isn't an unusual outcome; some of the engineers I know aren't as good, but they make more money because they took the interview grind seriously and went for companies with publicly-traded stock.

Maybe why US brands tend to get big in the US and then export overseas? US has a homogenous and large market, which brands can make a lot of money in and develop a solid profitable base. That's probably very hard to do in Europe.

So many VC funded projects seem to be aimed at American cultural problems too, exporting the issues they are trying to solve and fighting non American wye to solve those issues.

That's not really true. It's fair to say that a lot of supermarket chains have operations only in a single country, but there are quite a few multi-country brands as well which aren't uncommon.

A few examples: Carrefour, Auchen, Lidl, Audi, Tesco, (Euro/Inter)Spar, Iceland, Rewe - and that doesn't include subsidiaries of the same company (e.g. ICA/Rimi).

Actually it's fair to say most of the business is done by local chains, and Europe-wide operations are rather uncommon.

From your mentions, I'd only consider to be "Europe-wide" Carrefour and Spar. Carrefour is everywhere (though their market strategy changes a lot from country to country) and Spar's operations are kinda spotty but also kinda everywhere.

Auchan is everywhere, but in heavy decline because they're basically the Walmart (supercenter) of Europe and people don't like to drive to a hypermarket that much anymore. Almost their only profitable branch at the moment is their Chinese one.

Lidl and Aldi's presence is very spotty outside of Germany. Many countries copied their hard discount model so they have to fight with local companies that have a cultural edge (Lidl and Aldi tend to have tons of German products no matter the host country).

Tesco is a leader in the UK, then kinda common in Central-Eastern Europe, but then almost universally unknown in Germany-Austria-Italy and westward. There are more Tesco in Thailand than in the whole of Continental Europe, to put it in perspective.

Rewe is just in Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe (under different names and with wildly different marketing).

Iceland I never heard about, but it's overwhelmingly a UK operation from a quick search.

From your mentions I'd take the wild guess that you live (or have lived) a significant amount of time in the UK ;)

Tesco is big outside the UK and Ireland in a few Eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary. I think they were the first hypermarkets in these countries. I've lived in Italy and Spain, and my local supermarkets there were Carrefour and Auchan.

So yes it varies... But my point was that if you actually look it's fairly easy to find a supermarket brand that's HQed in another country.

Maybe more common (where I am) in Eastern Europe compared to Western Europe, as these markets are younger, so it made sense for foreign brands to come when everything opened than establishing everything from scratch.

Of course it's not so integrated as the US - you explained this yourself, brands and marketing are tailored for the local market - but it's not so uncommon as OP suggested.

Lidl started showing up maybe 15 years ago and is everywhere by now. I don't think any town/city with more than 20k people is missing a Lidl.

Tesco I've only seen in the UK.

[1]: Spara means "to save" in Swedish, so I've always thought that Spar was from here. TIL it's not.

The US dominates the software market (mostly for historic reasons but also for its unrivaled entrepreneur/VC/risk-taking management style) which sells it products everywhere in the world, earning much more on that way. And the remaining software products in Europe are acquired one-by-one (e.g. Skype).

Having said all of that: Being a software engineer in Europe is a privilege with a good income situation.

It would be actually very, very interesting to see the PPE information for a more comprehensive set of companies in the US and EU tech sectors.

Or maybe it's me out of the loop and the six figure salaries are the norm in the US even outside the most profitable companies in the world?

Edit: welp, of course the data was linked in the article: https://tipalti.com/profit-per-employee/

Just picking companies randomly a little lower from the list, Qualcomm is 118k, Oracle 81k, Advanced Micro Devices 30k.

Would Facebook have become the Facebook we all know and love today if it had started in Europe? Probably not, because local legislators as well as the public would have said "whoa, we're not doing THAT!" I mean, Belgium outright banned Facebook from collecting data a few years ago, and there are other cases as well.

Companies such as Intel and Microsoft have been repeatedly fined, and it's not hard to see how they would have ben prevented getting in such a position in the first place if they had been started in Europe.

Now, according to some viewpoints profit and size is everything; I've seen this expressed on HN a few times with comments such as "all tech giants are American, Europe is shit", but what this misses is the question if we're really better off with all these tech giants in the first place, because to be honest I'm not so sure that we are. I think quite a few Europeans would see the existence of these companies as a failure of the American system, rather than a success.

So part of the reason is that the US allows for some business practices that would be very difficult (or outright illegal) if a company would be EU-based.

It’s really a function of a willingness to make “big bets” that, when they pay off, pay handsomely.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25717390

Germany and Scandinavia come in a distant second, with Southern Europe falling significantly behind. The disparity in IT-intensive industries is particularly large.[2]

This is true even when comparing the productivity of workforces within the same market. I.e. European who work for American multinationals tend to be more productive than those who work for local multinationals. The short answer is that American management culture is really world-class. And, I think in software in particular, good management is a major force multiplier in terms of output and execution.

[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.24.1.203

[2] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.102.1.167

Your source points to an article about horseshoe crabs... Can you update it? I'd be interested to red about your claim.

The companies are bigger with much larger market share (often a significant fraction of the Earth's population) and benefit from the economies of scale that go with that - it's not like Facebook needs a million times more employees than a tiny web service a fraction of its size - tech work benefits massively from scale.

I'd argue the USA has these large companies for various reasons (the start-up environment with lots of VC money, supportive universities etc.) and dominates Europe because Europe doesn't engage in protectionism.

In Russia and China, where protectionism is much more common, the American tech giants are nowhere near dominant and they have their own local giants with Baidu, Yandex etc.

No one can beat Companies like Google, MS, Amazon.

Even a company like Facebook which basically does nothing useful earns so much money just because it was the social media platform which was early enough and one.

And with Google and similiar companies having the money year over year to hire the best people puts them even further at the edge.

It is not magic to be market leader in a market as young as it.

The value engineers for US companies generate is higher than the value engineers for EU/CAD companies generate, so they have a better bargaining position.

This is probably because US companies have a bigger market to start in, and have been more successful at expanding into other markets (including EU and CAD). The profit of tech companies is constrained by size of market addressed, not number of employees they hire.

https://elsajohansson.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/what-does-a-w...

Google and Facebook both have as many contractors as employees: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/28/technology/google-temp-wo...

> But the company’s increasing reliance on temps and contractors has some Google employees wondering if management is undermining its carefully crafted culture. As of March, Google worked with roughly 121,000 temps and contractors around the world, compared with 102,000 full-time employees, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times.

Accounting for those would reduce profit-per-employee to half. Furthermore, those contractors earn a lot less, further boosting the wages for the full-time employees.

That doesn't tell you AT ALL if Europe companies are 'low profitabile' or just 'avg'/'normal' while no one can just comped with the history of SV/SFR.

The real question then becomes: how do other countries cultivate highly-profitable tech companies (similar to the ones in the US)?