Who's in the better position? Me completing a Masters degree in the EU, spending anywhere between 10k and 20k EUR, and landing a job that pays 30k EUR/year and living a pipe dream of getting myself salaried with 100k EUR, and only perhaps after 10-15 years of continous effort (and luck). Or is it someone in the States who needs to spend as much as 5x more for the same level of degree (but not education and opportunities!) - but in the very first year of employment gets 100k per year and has a vast more opportunities to build their careers up?
My perspective: I'm an (Technical) Information Security Officer in the Netherlands and I'm at €120k if I include pension contributions (Which Dutch people almost never include in their 'gross' salary).
And this is with all the employee protections you get when being salaried in the Netherlands.
If you elect to go for a more American style contract with your employer where you have little to no protection you can easily make €200k or more. Two of my colleagues get €20k a month. Downside is that they're the first to go since they're more expensive and the company can just let you go for whatever reason they want essentially any time your contract is up for renewal.
These are called 'independent contractors' in my country but essentially they are just employed 'at will' as Americans call it.
I feel like most people online that complain about €30k salaries in Europe (which is minimum wage here by the way) are just parroting online meme talking points.
This is a great way of discrediting somebody's else opinion and also incredibly a very rude one.
I earn more than you do but that's besides the point since I'm most likely in 95th percentile of the market. The point that you're missing and that I'm trying to reinforce regardless of the very good position I'm in is that 50th percentile of the market is not anywhere near +100k EUR figure. I worked with 100s engineers across different domains in Europe so the sample size should be pretty representative. I also hired many engineers so I am familiar with the market value as well.
Finally, you're also missing the point that your sample of dutch market isn't representative of all European countries markets.
I'm sorry for the rude remark, but claiming software engineers and other IT professionals are working at the legal minimum wage came across as if you were mocking us.
My apologies.
And yes, perhaps the Dutch market is not representatie for all of the EU. But then again Silicon Valley isn't representative of all of the US but these salaries are usually posted for benchmark.
Still your argument doesn't apply since I wasn't comparing salaries of experienced professionals but out of the University starting salaries.
Considering the whole European market as a whole I think I was even optimistic with 30k figure since there are many professionals with years of experience still not managing to earn much more than that. And I'm talking about building smart stuff, algorithmic design.
100k USD figure OTOH was pessimistic and it didn't include SV starting salaries which would obviously be much larger than that.
I'm talking about the EU countries and not the third-world countries but since you're ignorant and disingenuous there's no purpose of continuing this discussion anymore. More graceful interpretation would be that you're limited in capabilities to understand distributions, percentiles and some fresher year statistics, in which case it should be easy to fix.
