[dan-robertson]

I mostly assume people here are above the threshold you describe but maybe that’s just wrong? I think the uniquely American perspective is software developers getting paid very well at plenty of big tech companies. That’s the kind of compensation that people who go into biglaw or investment banking would get without the poor working conditions or high barriers to entry. That sort of compensation is much less common in Europe, even from the same American tech companies. A thing people often say is that this compensates for high cost of living but plenty of European cities are expensive and cost of living adjustments for these companies in the US often aren’t so large relative to the compensation, presumably because people could threaten to move to a high-CoL area. Maybe this will stop being the case (software developers might get paid less in the US) at some point. And maybe that is already happening (stock prices no longer massively increasing making stock grants magically worth more) to a lesser extent.

Personally, I think most people don’t quit because of a lack of quantitative approaches but rather because they are afraid about losing what they have, ending somewhere else that’s worse, making big, irreversible-seeming decisions, etc.