[digitalixus]

> But those kind of spreads are less common in Europe.

Having lived and worked in Europe (Germany) for a few years now, I can confirm that this is the biggest lie/propaganda ever. It's particularly bad in the city I live in, where "bErLiN iS a PoOr N cHeAp CiTy So ThE sAlArIeS aReN't HiGh" is a meme disguised as a fact and spread around, especially to non-German newcomers. The massive salary spread is alive and well in Europe, but the people who benefit from it aren't talking about it enough (or at all, due to culture).

"Salaries are low in Europe" or "more fair across jobs" fooled even me when I first arrived, but now I see it for what it is - a salary suppression technique, a very effective one too since it's, by now, basically self-propagating. That "30k average wage before taxes" (that's the German figure, not sure about Denmark but they're all just as low and rigged) actually includes freelancers, part-timers and (I'm sure) even the under/unemployed! But you'll only know that after researching for the fine-print, a lot of times people parrot the "30k average" as a benchmark for full-time employment.

Some true salary figures from people I know in Berlin (I've seen matching payslips, so they're 100% not lying) include 65k for a frontend web dev with 2 years experience, 55k for marketing with 3 years experience, 60k for a junior non-technical PO. Mid-career devs (8-10 years experience) pull in 90k easy, while management/directors in startups get paid 120-200k. Currency is EUR btw, not $.

Yes all these figures, in Berlin, where they tell foreigners on Internet forums "45-60k is a LOT for a dev with 5-10 years experience, because cost of living in Berlin is low (it's not) so come on over and relocate!"

This is not helped by Europeans (particularly Germans and Scandinavians) being very reluctant to talk about salary, they are much more tight-lipped than Americans. So all you're gonna hear is mostly how Karen who moved to Berlin from America for her German boyfriend is making 28k at Zalando with her 3 years of experience. That's really the result of very effective wage-suppression propaganda - not a true reflection of market rates and nowhere near what informed people are getting paid.

[thedufer]

I think this reinforces the parent commenter's point. The range of salaries for just new grads in the US is wider than what you've mentioned. In lower CoL areas you occasionally see as little as 30k-40k, although that seems to be pretty rare, while the high end in expensive cities is around 250k or so. In my experience a solid established company will frequently offer around twice as much as a funded startup for the same candidate.

[vegardx]

In Norway all income data is publicly available.

We must have very different experience. I've found that people from the US are very reluctant to talk about how much they make; unless they're in the top brackets.

I would also argue that 60k+ is good for a junior position. We might disagree.

[eeZah7Ux]

> people from the US are very reluctant to talk about how much they make; unless they're in the top brackets

Yep!

[mcv]

Would this be related to the claim that Americans are never poor, just temporarily embarrassed millionaires? Only people at the top would have nothing to be embarrassed about, while everybody else would love to tell you how much they make once their ship has come in.

[foldr]

Hmm I would say that Americans may be wary of revealing their own personal salary, but that there's very open discussion of typical wages for any given kind of position in the US, and it's not considered taboo to complain about being offered a salary below your expectations.

[digitalixus]

Correction, they are publicly available for locals with (whatever you call a SSN in Norway). A non-Norwegian not living in Norway (for example, a person being offered a job to relocate there) would not be able to access that database.

[vegardx]

That's correct, it was recently changed a little. That said, I'm not sure how that would help you anyway, given that you probably wouldn't know anyone to look up?

There are better ways to look these things up, like trade unions. There are plenty of them, and they all publish income data on a regular basis.

[C1sc0cat]

How did they gat that past the new privacy regulations

[marvin]

Your contribution to the welfare state (absolutely MASSIVE public sector) is considered public information, to ensure that everyone trusts that everyone contributes equally. Not joking.

[C1sc0cat]

But does this outweigh the individuals rights

[vegardx]

It's not considered private information, I guess. There's also exceptions to gdpr for laws and regulation, so I assume they're pretty well covered, being /the government/ and all. This data is published by the tax authority.

And it isn't something new, it's been like this since post-WW2.

[C1sc0cat]

Just because its been this way since ww2 is not a good argument - this sounds like complacency to me.

[eeZah7Ux]

> That's really the result of very effective wage-suppression propaganda

Spot on. Companies often pay "marketing/PR" agencies to take all sort of actions to push salaries and expectations down, prevent unionization, suppress rumors about wrongdoing and so on.

Many of those agencies pay freelance private investigators, "media influencers" and even black hats.

The techniques include spreading rumors, writing articles, commenting on forums, creating fake reviews on glassdoors.

Even HR employees use wage-suppression techniques by publishing fake job ads, doing unneded interviews and so on.

[marvin]

I think you've got an excellent point regarding salary suppression propaganda; this is in my opinion quite widespread in Europe. I have seen examples of wage suppression collusion that would result in lawsuits in the US, and the propaganda examples you provide sound very similar to things I hear locally. (Scandinavia).

However, 90k per year for a senior engineer is peanuts compared to the shareholder value a well-placed engineer can generate. I think this is reflected in the compensation of the major tech companies in the US; they can easily be double this amount or more. And you'd be hard-pressed to find those salaries for a non-director employed position in Europe. Some consultants can demand this rate, which interestingly provides a clear image on what a company is willing to pay for the right to fire someone at will.

What we're lacking in Europe, apart from seeing through the propaganda, is enough companies that can properly utilize technology and would benefit from attracting the best engineers. That would lead to better pay.

[magduf]

>What we're lacking in Europe, apart from seeing through the propaganda, is enough companies that can properly utilize technology and would benefit from attracting the best engineers. That would lead to better pay.

Don't forget, however, that cost of living is generally cheaper in much of Europe (maybe not in Switzerland or Scandinavia though), than in the big tech-hub cities in America. Rent is cheaper, food is cheaper (and better quality), healthcare is much cheaper. Also, you can pretty easily get along without a car, which is a huge expense for Americans.

[marvin]

Maybe true for Europe in general, but at least for Norway, this isn't really the case. It's not as crazy expensive here as in the major tech hubs, of course, but you'll still pay at least 300k USD for a completely average dwelling anywhere near what we would call a major city (population 200,000 or more).

I found food to be similar in price or cheaper when I was on holiday in San Francisco. Avoiding the car is doable if you live in one of these city centers, but then the dwelling will be 400k and up. And a car will run you ~7000k USD per year in TCO, unless you drive an old beater. Taxation is around 50% in aggregate, probably slightly higher if you take care and count all the smaller taxes.

Guaranteed healthcare, workers' rights, vacations, parental leave and social safety net in case of disaster are fantastic, though. Although you'd probably get better _treatment_ if you've good good insurance in the US. It's probably a better quality of life if you're in the bottom 60% of earning power.

[magduf]

>Maybe true for Europe in general, but at least for Norway

I specifically mentioned Scandinavia as an exception in my post.

And Norway is even more exceptional, because it's not even in the EU, unlike the other Scandinavian nations.

>It's not as crazy expensive here as in the major tech hubs, of course, but you'll still pay at least 300k USD for a completely average dwelling

That's not far from what you'd pay in one of America's larger tech-hub cities, and far less than you'd pay in Silicon Valley.

I'm not trying to claim that Europe is as cheap as Thailand, I'm just pointing out that America is really expensive to live in these days in the nicer cities. Even in smaller crappy places, the rent has gotten ridiculous in the past decade or two.

But again, for the rest of your stuff, as I said, I specifically called out Scandinavia and Switzerland as exceptional and expensive. From what I saw in Germany, it's really cheap to live there compared to a major tech hub in the US, and the quality of life is much better.

[troels]

This is very accurate. I think it might be somewhat true for the majority of the workforce though. For specialised roles such as developers, management etc. I think the spread is bigger.

If I were to guess, I would say that the lower bound is higher, giving a skewed distribution with a big bloc of salaries around the same avg. range. Couple this with a reluctance for high earners to speak openly about it and you have the illusion of everybody getting roughly the same.

A very clear sign that wages are kept superficially low, is that as a contractor I can get away with asking 3x what I would as a perm developer. In theory I get less job security this way, but in reality there is so much demand that this is a non-issue.

[yourapostasy]

> ...but in reality there is so much demand that this is a non-issue.

In reality, apart from some niche areas and companies, speaking in broad population terms, it is best under current economic culture and terms to treat every job, even "full-time with benefits" ones, as contract jobs subject to instant termination.

For the broad population, there really isn't much of a job stability ecosystem in the economy any longer. For the tech employment scene in general terms, job hop for the salary gains until you plateau out, work to your best abilities while you seek out and develop your next local maxima and start job hopping again towards that. Most managers, companies, institutions and the general market speak through their actions that they're perfectly fine with this state of affairs, protestations to the contrary. Let the economy speak, listen intently, and follow through the words to their logical conclusion.

I'm not a fan of this, as we're losing significant "complexity cohesion" where we comprehend and reason about complex solutions to solve entire complex problem domains which only come with time and stability as we are still emotional creatures that don't respond well to chronic stress. But scraping away micron-layers of low-hanging fruit will eventually, at some point before the heat death of the Universe, get us to approximately the same place.

[gyaru]

>This is not helped by Europeans (particularly Germans and Scandinavians) being very reluctant to talk about salary, they are much more tight-lipped than Americans.

Huh, salary is basically public information in most Scandinavian countries..

[mindjiver]

I don't find Swedes so reluctant to speak about salaries anymore, I think it has changed the last 10 years or so. Maybe this is just my reflections as a Swede though. I mean, your income tax return is public information so if someone wants to get a good idea on what other people maybe, it is really not that hard to look it up if you really want.

I currently live and work in Germany and I know that here it is much more tight lipped, it might even be a fireable offense for you to talk about your salary, which might explain why people don't really talk about it.

[mont]

Seeing those numbers honestly reaffirms that wages are lower in Europe. I know a lot of people who out of college are making $100K+ USD working for FAANG.

[digitalixus]

Perhaps, but they're certainly not as low as a lot of people portray them to be. I know a guy who did mechanical engineering and with just 1 internship experience was offered a job at VW (albeit in Wolfsburg, not Berlin) for 65k a year upon graduation.

50-65k EUR as a starting salary in Berlin with under 2 years experience will make many people's eyeballs pop out and they'll start rambling about how "30k is the average and that's just disgustingly overpaid". Truth is though that it's reasonable to find those (tech or nontech, the trick is to not accept the first shit job, probably from Rocket Internet, that you get offered within 2 weeks of applying) and it's not overvalued - people making 30k are the ones being underpaid.

Also $100k for FAANG in the Silicon Valley is nothing. Assuming single young worker, 60+k EUR in Germany would be very competitive with the 100-150k USD range in the valley because you can rent a NICE studio apartment for 800-1000 EUR, spending 30-40 EUR on a night out is already plenty and in bigger cities like Berlin, you can get away without a car (it's still uncomfortable and inconvenient, but much less so if you're single, and certainly much better than BART and 99% of American cities).

If you're taking 6 figures in a LCOL US city where you're socking away 70% of your income as savings at under age 30, then yes, there's no equivalent to be found in Europe.