[pavlov]

Mainly because USA developed multiple geographic clusters where software developers are in high demand (Bay Area for consumer tech, New York for finance etc.) and the funding ecosystem is both deep-pocketed and culturally supports paying for talent. Traditionally European VCs and founders both operated under the assumption that startups need to save money rather than spend to get the best. And consequently those startups don’t grow into big companies that would pay for talent.

It’s worth noting that the meteoric rise of Bay Area software engineer salaries is a fairly new phenomenon. In the mid 2000s, salaries were actively suppressed by a wage cartel that included Steve Jobs. The companies paid out a $324M settlement to employees [1].

Mark Zuckerberg is often said to have been the crucial CEO who broke the cartel. Facebook started paying higher salaries and hiring aggressively from Google and others who had been suppressing wages.

[1] http://www.equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-sili...

[badpun]

Most coders don't work in tech or startups, but in regular businesses. An yet, they still make more in the US than in Europe. Perhaps it falls in line with general lower compensation in Europe - I mean, for example there are plenty job offers for accountants in London (super-expensive city) which advertise sub 30k pounds pay per year. I don't think there are a lot of accountants in NYC who would take a job for the equivalent $35k...

[moomoo11]

I live in the US but almost all the apps and services I use, and that my multinational company use, are all headquartered and founded in the USA.

I don’t think we use a single service that’s based out of Europe or Asia.

I don’t know any European startup or big company whose services I use frequently besides Spotify. Meta, google, Netflix, a bunch of database and infrastructure services, AWS, etc. are all based in the USA.

It seems to me like 90% of the innovations come from the US. Whether that is software, hardware, medicine, defense, etc. all the things at massive scale at use in the world come from here, and maybe later on get moved to being made elsewhere. Maybe that has something to do with it?

Even the company I work at, which was at one point a unicorn before ipo, and services a massive global industry, is based here and has auxiliary offices (support, sales) in other countries.

Anything mission critical is built here, even if it’s only for an international market.

Maybe there are some industries that pay well overseas compared to here because they are better innovators and more mature?

[stingraycharles]

Isn’t the cost of living in US, especially in the “clusters of high demand”, generally higher than Europe as well?

[badpun]

Not hugely so. Properties in top cities in Europe are probably as expensive as in top areas of US (NYC, SV). Rent is higher in US (that's because, if landlords charged SV/NYC rents in Europe, then the flats would just be empty, as the rent would be more than 100% of salaries of most people), but mortgage is comparable. Other typical cost of living expenses are somewhat higher in US (according to https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...). Salaries, on the other hand, are massively higher in US than in Europe.

[legacynl]

I don't agree.

You get higher wages in the US, but you also have to pay more in the US. Healthcare (or saving money for when you need healthcare), schools, having to drive everywhere, etc.

In most of western Europe you don't actually need that high salary. There are no crazy medical bills, your children can go to school for free, you don't have to spend a couple of bucks for gas for every errand.

Also i think your comparison is a bit skewed because afaik Paris and New-York are famously expensive. I think using this comparison is more realistic: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

[0xBDB]

I live in the Dallas area. A typical salary in my corner of tech is 150k. That's about 30 percent in income taxes. Sales tax, etc. is (more or less) deductible from that. Like all of the 92 percent of Americans with health insurance, my annual out-of-pocket expenditure on healthcare is capped, in my case at 10k. 2 years of community college and 2 years of state school for my kid will probably run about 60k, one-time. Love your rail networks, but a "couple of bucks for gas" here isn't a liter; that will get me 2/3 of a gallon which is 30 miles in a Honda Civic, which is 10 errands.

If I moved to London for example the salary would be at most 100k (U.S. equivalent; I've looked), 50% would be tax, and while your site tells me that overall cost of living is only about 5% higher, I find that highly improbable. I am not disputing that the peace of mind factor in Europe is worth something. I don't think there's any reasonable price you could ascribe to it to make the math work out for even a single year, let alone a career, however.

[cm2012]

Even West Virginia has a higher GDP per Capita than France. The US is just a really rich country (that has a very inefficient medical system)

[merek]

> Traditionally European VCs and founders both operated under the assumption that startups need to save money rather than spend to get the best. And consequently those startups don’t grow into big companies that would pay for talent.

I wonder if startups have a better chance of becoming profitable in the EU than in the US, despite the on-average smaller company size.

Reasoning: careful cost management gives a startup more time to understand the problem and to test more ideas. Compare to a startup with a high cash burn rate, the window to test and iterate is much smaller.

Would anyone know of any sources that may support / reject this idea?

[Sevii]

On the other hand, at will employment in the US allows startups to have big layoffs when things go wrong allowing them to more easily survive through hard times. That is not easy to do when you have to give months of notice before firing anyone.