AFAIK salaries are rather low there, but cost of living is quite expensive.

As far I as know, here in France CS engineers are never hungry, but they don't have nice cars. I'd say middle class. There is a difference in value here, marketing and sales people are paid more than engineers, and they generally rule the show. Startups are often created or ruled by people out of a business school. F.Penso is an exception I think because he's the original French startup guy, tinkerer and hipster (I mean this guy has a soviet era photo camera) since the first wave of startup hype. I'm slightly disappointed he didn't strike it rich because he's been active in the field for quite some time (and he built what was one of the biggest french websites at the time).

> I'm slightly disappointed he didn't strike it rich because he's been active in the field for quite some time

I appreciate your comment but I'm not disappointed. If being rich means working 20 hours a day for 5 years will little luck of success in the end (like any startups), I'm not willing to pay the price.

I've traveled months per year the recent years, spent a year in Asia, rided 22,000 kilometers in India on Enfield (and about to go again for 4 months) and so more much I can't list here. I feel very lucky of my current position.

However I have to say the feeling I had when living in San Francisco is as following. If I had spent as much time and dedication on my projects while living in San Francisco instead of Paris, I would have had 100 times more in return than what I've had in France. On a money level, as well as on a professional level. Might be too late now.

That is not only in France, it's in all Europe. Salaries in Germany, The Netherlands, UK and so on are much much lower than in SF or NY. Developer jobs that pay more than 60k euro are few and far between. A 50k+ job is already above average and upgrading is not going to be easy.

The difference is, Europe see developers as commodities. They don't care, they don't need them as much as they do in San Francisco.

San Francisco see developers as the only way to achieve their project they just raised 10 millions for. You're gold to them, they accept to pay a higher price.

In Europe most young developers want to be Product Manager (or any Manager positions), most developers in SF don't care about this, they want to have fun. The reason could be you get paid super well in SF, and not in Europe :)

Absolutely, I completely agree with those things. I don't think devs here want to go into some kind of management position because they're not having fun in a technical job. It's because technical jobs in Europe are a dead end. You can make a living (just pray you don't get fired after your 50s), but anyone with a bit of ambition can see that it's just not worth it in the long run. Why stay as a developer when you can go into a cushy management or presales position that pays easily over 100k?

Exactly This. MBA's aren't a joke in EU. They are actually taken seriously..

They aren't a joke in the US or the rest of the world either. It's only in certain circles that they're not valued. There's plenty of companies where an MBA from a well-known university is a passport stamp (and prerequisite) to a high paying job.

What's important is not to stop at comparing salaries. Compare total costs of living. Healthcare, housing, commuting, taxes, insurance. Compare (real) options for work or education or you and your family.

Thanks, now I understand why UK/EU recruiters are soliciting 60-80K euros positions to me all the time. They probably think the salary is so good I am going to drop everything and move over there.

Pretty much, 80k for a dev position in the EU is very rare (except in London/finance).

Interesting. Are these 50-60k/year developers available for contract hire? How would an American company find them online?

Hard to say, every country has its own market gotchas. Those 50k something devs are almost always working in salaried positions.

I can count in one hand the number of technical freelancers I've ever seen or heard about but I also have never actively searched for one. On the other hand there are a lot of companies that act as middlemen between contractors and companies. These contractors are employed and paid by the middlemen, but they go on to work directly on the client's site. These middlemen make a very decent profit since they pay their employees the usual (20-40 euros/h), while they bill them out to companies for up to five times as much. In some languages these companies have a specific name but I don't know how to translate it. I think they're a bit different than the agencies in the USA where as far as I know they take a percentage of the contractor's hourly rate.

In any case I guess Linkedin is a decent starting point. In some European countries it is used by huge percentages of the working population.

Those middle men are just recruitment agencies, generally. As a standard they don't have guys on staff and will take somewhere between 15%-30% on top. The 5x as much usually have full time employees and are something different, though it does happen.

For the contractor, contracting via a respected agency means you're almost guaranteed to be paid. However, they don't really offer much value beyond that. I personally dislike dealing with them but then again, my last contract didn't pay the agent, and I still got paid.

Yes, I wasn't talking about recruitment agencies, I was talking about the ones with full time staff.

Recruitment agencies.

They don't really do that much besides spam the local job sites, but being from the US you won't know the local job sites, so you can either need to invest in figuring that out or you can pay recruiters their cut.

UK wise, there are a whole bunch of sites I guess the following catch most of the population:-

http://cwjobs.co.uk http://gumtree.com/uk http://jobsite.co.uk http://www.s1jobs.com/ http://www.technojobs.co.uk/ http://www.monster.co.uk

60000e is about £50000. Inside London or working within the finance industry, there will be developers who'll be earning more than that figure, especially contractors. However, typically contract rates seem to be between £200 - £400 per day, with some outliers on both ends of the scale.

This. I'm paid almost 50k in Paris, leaving this year to the US to find a job.

I should follow your path. Do you have a visa? Or do you plan to find the firm and request the visa then?

Hello Yves, I don't have one, I don't feel my credentials from Paris will get me far enough, so I will go to SF and NYC physically this summer. The VISA can come later.

Thank you for your (double) feedback! :-)

If you want to communicate more, i'm Igosuki on twitter.

And don't buy the 35-hour workweek for a second. As a developer, especially a lead, the hours can be very similar to the USA.