In mainland Europe, the salaries for programmers are much more in line with the rest of the workforce, and lower than that of engineers, on average.
There's much less of a craze to learn programming here.
Part of the reason for the job craze in the us for programmers it that there are increasingly fewer opportunities for unskilled or low skilled labor in the us, as compared to europe. we rarely have internship programs at high schools, and companies are often desperate to find skilled machinists. But also the fact that we pay so much to good devs - that pay is only because of the tremendous worker shortages.