The counter to that counter is that I have been told that software jobs in Germany start out as very low paying. My friend who moved to Germany to work as a programmer ended up only getting about $30k a year to start, which at the time was less than half of what our peers were making in the US.

That said, I think probationary periods are one of the best ideas the US needs to adopt.

A junior/graduate dev in Germany makes €50K a year. $28K is the minimum wage for a full time employee.

>>probationary periods are one of the best ideas the US needs to adopt

May I ask why? Both Canada and USA allow employers to fire with 2 weeks (or a month .. I forget )notice.

Even though you are entitled to fire people in the US, there are a lot of differing state and city rules. You are also open to (potential) lawsuits at all times. There are also now a lot of very obtuse rules about things like healthcare coverage for full time employees.

There's an extra layer of simplicity when it comes to probationary periods.

In the US you can be fired with 0 notice or severance, regardless of tenure in most states.

>Not sure about Japan or rest of EU, but in Germany, landing a SWE with no prior experience beyond basics(watched some videos on YouTube and wrote some HTML/CSS in notepad) in larger corps is easy.

I don't think this is true at all, but even if SWE pays pretty badly in Germany, at least compared to the US.

SWE pays bad everywhere compared to the US.