I've heard from a lot of my colleagues that they couldn't afford to have the same lifestyle in an Western capital city with equivalent IT salaries. I know I wouldn't be able to rent in downtown Amsterdam, Paris or Milano with my equivalent IT earnings were I to live in those cities the same way I now do in Bucharest.
It's true. Unless you work for a FAANG, or some Fin-Tech or a unicorn flush with cash, dev wages in Western EU are not higher than Eastern EU anymore.
I know devs in Poland and Romania making way more than me and some friends do in Austria/France/Belgium.
It's because of huge amount of outsourcing from US companies moving directly to Eastern EU, pushing the wages higher than what Western EU based companies can offer locally, coupled with the higher taxes in the Western countries, meaning devs in the West taking home lower wages than their counterparts in the East.
Someone here said it well, but I don't have the original post to quote anymore: {a cleaner in Sweden makes way more than a cleaner in Poland, but a dev in Poland can end up making as much or more than a dev in Sweden}. That's whack but that's the reality of supply and demand caused by the bleed from the US tech boom to certain regions.
That's not really true. I live in Austria and many more skilled professions earn better than most devs here as the local SW industry sucks, almost no product-based companies and a market overabundant with talent.
I'm sure in hot markets with plenty of product based companies like London, Berlin, Amsterdam or Eastern Europe the situation is better.
0 - https://www.payscale.com/research/IT/Job=Junior_Software_Eng...
1 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/708972/average-annual-no...
The thing about management is what I've heard Italian devs complain about (and it's a common complaint is tech-weaker countries), that to get decent money you have to transition to management, whereas countries with stronger tech sectors like the US have more companies that let engineers continue to grow as engineers (or architects).
Was my original comment and point. Salaries for tech are very good for the local markets, even if they might be considered low compared to other markets.
Of course, part of this may be that the wage spectrum as a whole is compressed compared to the US, but that's an explanation, not a contradiction.
Yes, it is in any capitalist economy, because income distribution isn't normal. In the US, for instance, per capita GDP is about $64k, but median personal income is a little over $35k, and median pay of a full-time worker income, annualized, is just under $45k. An individual worker making just over the per capita GDP is doing quite well.
This is the main Problem. Technical excellence is not valued and rewarded enough. The best Engineers get promoted to Mediocre managers because that's the only way to move forward. The result is an economy focused on micromanaging for small gains instead of innovation for big gains.
The situation in the EU is the same as in the US, and outside the local hubs, wages are lower.
That's simply not true. Programmers around the EU are among the best paid professionals in their local markets, even more so for young people (out of college/school/university). The salaries are far away from Silicon Valley levels, but are still very high locally.