[mcv]

I'm still regularly surprised at how underpaid programmers in western Europe often are. I mean, it's a solid job, but if you want to make more money, you have to become a manager, and that's really sad. Working freelance makes it a lot better, and demand for our skills is sky-high, but when I read about American salaries, I still wonder we we're being paid less.

If African programmers make $20k, that's not that much less than what I made when I started out, nearly 20 years ago.

[foobiekr]

I used to wonder why salaries were so low in Canada considering that, at one time, Canada had a pretty decent industry (QNX, Nortel, a lot of NMS/EMS companies, etc.). At least with Canada, the basic answer IMHO is that the country doesn't value software technology or perhaps even technology in general. It is basically a resource extraction economy that has killed off most high technology over a long period (including aerospace).

In contrast, there does not seem to be any ready answer for the UK and continental Europe and so it's a mystery to me. Germany had just as big a small computer boom in the late 1970s and especially the early 1980s that gave rise to my generation in the US so why didn't a huge industry come out of it? The UK had a similar setting and a similar outcome.

[currymj]

Some would say the elites in Great Britain simply don't have any respect for scientific knowledge -- this has been argued going back to CP Snow's "Two Cultures" essay. Everybody in power did PPE or whatever and being an engineer is low-status. This could be the case in the rest of Europe.

[mcv]

Netherland seems to be mostly a management culture. Managers, even bad ones, get paid more than programmers. Careers that people choose for money are manager, physician and lawyer. Economics is popular since it's assumed to lead to a management career. We do get some good tech, but it's not rewarded the way it is in the US.