Why aren’t software engineers valued more in EU?

Matter of scale. A team of engineers working on building a Dutch marketplace has a potential customer base of 18 million. An American company doing the same can reach 300 million. Assuming equal complexity, the American engineer can deliver far more value because his target audience is much larger.

Scale can be like a force multiplier for engineers. Makes them deliver more value and employers are able to pay them more.

What is value in this context though?

Seems for Google the value is actual money and for a startup it is a potential future earning? Yet the startup developer in San Francisco is still (presumably) paid 200k or more? If that startup fails, was the developer overvalued?

No, it just means the startup's investors made a bad bet

If you use scaling up as an argument for paying a higher salary, wouldn’t scaling down do the same but in the opposite direction?

it's only the US (AFAIK) that pays developers so highly, and even then it's primarily in cities and companies amenable to venture capital. It's not about how valued the career is, it's about how profitable it is - and when you can take 10s or 100s of millions in investment to build a software platform using a couple dozen devs, it becomes pretty clear why they're paid so high in those areas.

I value the service of my local council's binmen more than most developers' output (including my own). Doesn't mean they get paid the big bucks.

Most people accept it's just another job which pays a bit (somewhere a lot more) better compared to alternatives.

Also the companies who employ these engineers aren't making that much money to burn. That's just my hunch, I haven't done a thorough research.

I have asked this several times. I think the answer is because they can.

If you want to make more money you become a manager. Developers are just like electricians or brick layers.

They also don’t have the FAANG to create tons of value from software.

Here’s a thread with 900+ replies on that question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25766884

Why are software engineers valued so highly in California?

Historically the very best software engineers outside the US simply immigrated to the US, joined a Silicon Valley company, and made a good living. The quality of those left behind, who didn’t have the same mobility, was on average lower. So companies didn’t have good reason to open an office elsewhere. This was especially true before the Internet, since collaboration was much more difficult. These days there are probably great engineers in many locations, but it takes time for their local tech economy to catch up to locations with concentrations of employers and employees like Silicon Valley. They need employers to open local offices (attracted by cheaper or better talent), and then for competing employers to also do so, in order to change the supply demand dynamics to favor software engineers. Then their salaries will rise accordingly.

Another part of the equation: in today’s age of massive aggregation around a few gigantic tech monopolies in the US, those few companies are able to pay large salaries because they derive a lot of value from their employees. But the reality of compensation is not very dissimilar between the US and other locations once you remove FAANG from the equation. FAANG companies employee a very highly selectively chosen segment of software developers who can command high value, but are also a tiny slice of the market. But the majority of software engineers in America are not employed in FAANG or compensated that way.