I agree. Don't think it's because it's a "more unionized and segmented job market" though - no techie I know is in a union. I think it's a different attitude - most places don't want guys working 80 hours/week and burning out (actually illegal in some countries), just somebody who'll come in and deliver with a team. So a x10 dev, why would you pay for that? Hence, saner salaries (maybe, this is just a theory).

Coming back to negotiation room, often, basic benefits are already included (e.g. healthcare, although this seems to be true in the US, too). But 35 hour weeks, more holiday, longer lunch break to go to the gym, working from home twice a week, these are all things I've negotiated.

I'm sure you can negociate if you have offers from Google, Facebook and Palantir in London. Negociating only works in hot markets, and there are very few of them for tech in the EU.

Maybe, but the compensation range for developers in London is much narrower than you might think. From what I've seen, most startups offer in the range £30k-70k per year, probably with some mostly useless stock option deal. I've seen salaries out of Amazon and Facebook starting at £50k, and even at investment banks, for more junior positions. These are all basically suckers, given the cost of living in London, among other things.

Anything below £70k isn't worth consideration, unless you really want to be in London I guess. There will be better offers elsewhere.

Above £70k the range is basically £70k-100k, for a number of reasons. At £100k you end up in a different tax bracket, to the point where you may want to start considering taking other perks other than salary, to keep your tax cost down. Also, if you're being offered that kind of money, you're likely accepting a director-level offer, so really for engineers the meaningful range is about £70k-100k. Since you mentioned Palantir, I'll mention that I met with a recruiter of theirs who mentioned in our first (and only) meeting that their salaries were in this specific range.

For contract work, you can quite easily break the £100k barrier, but obviously now you're running your own shop with all of the issues that brings. Or possibilities, depending on your perspective!

Both Facebook and Google pay about £80k for new grads (£60k salary + £20k in stock and bonus). Seniors earn about double that. Palantir pays interns £5k / month plus free rent.

Sounds about right. No one mentioned the free rent thing to me, but I guess that's in corporate housing where you don't want to stay anyway. May I ask how you know?

Usually corporate housing at top tech comapanies is pretty sweet. I have friends who got offers.

I've lived in corporate housing and it's all but sweet. Sure, the first period is all fun and well, but you can't live there. It's kind of like living in a drab hotel, or fancier dorm rooms. It's not home, and never will be. At least that's my experience, mileage varies of course.

Well, as I said, it's only for interns, so usually for 3 months.

I've only seen £70k+ for senior developers. Where my definition of senior here is >= 5 years professional experience.

About £70k is what I see for senior devs (I'm fine with your definition) at well paying startups, but you can definitely get more in the city or the wharf at one of the financial institutions. For startups though, my experience says £70k is about what well paying startups are willing to dish out. There are outliers though, obviously. (Case in point: I know at least one startup that pay some of their engineers up and potentially even beyond the £100k mark.)

I don't know what Facebook, Amazon, Google etc. pay, but from what I've heard I'm guessing it's about in the same £70k-£100k bracket as the financial firms.

EU is not homogeneous. Different areas work differently. Which part do you have experience of?

Italy, UK, Sweden to name a few, With UK being a bit more open.

My personal experience agrees with yours, there's not that much room – at least not in the higher end.

In the mainland EU M&P (manergerial and professional ) jobs in the IT securer arn't unionized in the same way workers in BMW are.

In the UK there are unions (Prospect and the FDA) that specialize in the M&P area and do have highly paid members I know an Ex CTO at Motorola was a member and the CEO of Hull communications was an activist in his early career.