[Tade0]

I've been struggling with a similar question lately (only Poland instead of the UK and... the UK instead of the US) and here's what I've come up with:

It's not about being paid poorly/well - it's about serving a specific market segment.

To give an example: I work for a company based in Poland so I get to do "Tier 3" stuff, namely churn out apps with a Java back-end and an Angular/React/Vue/whatever front-end. I make considerably less than your junior salary. 90% of job opportunities here look like this.

What about the other 10%? Sure, they're more interesting, but they're usually paid less. And I'm not even talking about startups - just regular companies who happened to gain the trust of an overseas client.

[iztyhi]

> churn out apps with a Java back-end and an Angular/React/Vue/whatever front-end

That's basically what all of us product engineers at FB do, it's just that there's so much competition for engineers here that they have to pay us well.

[Tade0]

I have to ask: how is all that not outsourced for half the price already?

[richardknop]

I think some companies tried to outsource stuff like this (Oracle, IBM) but they are slowly finding that there are real costs associated with outsourcing tech and it might be actually cheaper for the company to hire expensive developers in San Francisco but have them sitting in the same building as top management so the communication can happen in real time and engineers can fully understand business requirements rather than try to manage remote outsourced teams on the other side of the globe who have no idea what's happening at the HQ.

[shanghaiaway]

The work of a developer at Google is more valuable than at other companies, especially in Europe. Because they create more value with the same skillset and doing similar work, Google can pay more.

[barrkel]

Of course, the company doesn't need to pay you for what value you're able to create - they pay you what the labour market clears at, and pocket the difference.