[ChuckNorris89]

You heard wrong, it's just an internet myth. Difficulty of firing people or high taxes are not the main cause of low pay in Europe.

The main causes are: lack of VC funding, lack of innovative disruption and entrenchment of traditional businesses with old-fashioned boomer MBA mentality that consider tech as an expensive cost center and devs as replaceable factory floor cogs that should be offshored whenever possible, risk adverse investor mindsets, complex bureaucracy, fragmented market with various languages, laws and cultures that make scaling a product/service nearly impossible, a broken EU-grant funding system where the focus is producing documentation instead of successful products/services and an overabundance of low- to mid- level talent due to hype, free education and easy immigration.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about the pay in Europe, I'm complaining about the shitty SV practices that some entitled employers here adopt but without the compensation because "If Google does it then it must be good so we should do it too, who cares if we pay only 40k/year vs 200k+, we deserve only the best hoop-jumpers and nothing less."

[NeverFade]

I know people who worked in Europe, and Germany specifically, and they all said it's much harder to fire employees in Germany (and Western Europe generally) compared to the US.

[disgruntledphd2]

That's true, but in general, if you need to fire employees regularly, then your hiring process is broken.

The way I look at it is that it's far too easy to fire people in the US, and this also leads to pathologies.

[shuckles]

Counter-point: one of the “obscene” pay companies mentioned in this thread builds its entire culture around firing people regularly.

[disgruntledphd2]

Sure, and they are the one that makes the least money :)

[shuckles]

What does that have to do with anything?

[disgruntledphd2]

One could argue that the lack of free cash flow is correlated with the shitty culture.

I'm not sure I'd make that argument, but Netflix doesn't really count as big tech to me as I'm not convinced they'll survive for much longer.