>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.