But really, it’s much easier to enter the EU. You have dozens of countries with their own rules so there are many more options. Plus immigration rules tend to be much easier than the US with its famously strict legal immigration with low caps.

Indeed, this balance between supply and demand is exactly what keeps US tech salaries high. Our dynamic economy creates a lot of tech roles while our restrictive immigration limits high skill immigrants from filling those roles, raising salaries.

Tech companies have been lobbying unsuccessfully for years to raise or eliminate the h-1b cap, which would absolutely cut salaries. That’s why they are lobbying for it, to reduce their labor costs.

Personally I think this is all going to be moot anyway. With software development becoming a mostly remote role after the pandemic, I’ve seen a lot less barrier over the past few years to hiring offshore teams. My own small division of 100 people has offshore teams in 3 countries.

And yet there is very little tech immigration into Europe, comparatively. Must be the low salaries.

You can earn European level tech salaries in Bangalore and Beijing now. There isn't as much demand to move there and uproot your family just for $30-50k a year.

> Ah yes, the last 30 odd years of increasing immigration has exerted tremendous downward pressure on US tech salaries.

I'm not 100% sure, so I have to ask. Are you being sarcastic about immigration not exerting tremendous downward pressure on US tech salaries?

I’d be curious to hear opinions on why this large compensation discrepancy exists.

AFAIK, my company has never considered outsourcing to remote Euro workers. Is there a perceived difference in engineer quality? Time difference?

>Is there a perceived difference in engineer quality?

Intuitively, yes. If you're both brilliant, care about money, and want to stay and live in the EU, you aren't going to be a software engineer.

In the US, it's a solid path to a lucrative career.

Having worked in the EU and the US, here are some differences that I think are relevant for global employers:

- The hiring pool is much smaller than in the US, one reason is probably demographics and lack of skilled immigration. This makes it less attractive to hire/grow there.

- Labor regulation is much more strict. It's legally hard and expensive to lay off workers in Germany, for example.

- Taxes are much higher than in the US, so even if employers spend a lot of money on payroll, much less of it will end up in employees checking accounts.

- Demand is much lower. Tech industry in Europe is definitely there, but not booming to the same degree as in the US.

>Labor regulation is much more strict. It's legally hard and expensive to lay off workers in Germany, for example.

Is a few months notice [0] too much to ask? You can fire anyone you want, you're just going to wait a little bit or pay their remaining salary if you want them gone immediately. There is nothing legally hard about it. The hardest part is probably that you have to physically mail the layoff notice, but nothing prevents you from just directly giving it to them straight into their hands to be perfectly compliant with the law. Also, most of these laws only apply to companies with employee counts in the double digits. Not to small startups hiring their third employee.

[0] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bgb/__622.html

There's much more to this than you cite. There's Betriebsrat and Sozialplan etc. I'm not at all saying any of this is bad, but it does play an important role when companies make decisions about where to put their engineering centers.

Have you heard how hardware companies like AMD suck at software?

Now imagine an entire country specialising in hardware like Germany.