Your argument isn’t rigorous in that it assumes salaries are the same. A programmer earning 70k in London would be hard pressed to earn the equivalent in Euros in Amsterdam. Also as someone who has spent a good bit of money in bars and clubs all around Amsterdam as a student, and not just as a tourist in the red light district, I don’t know where you’ve managed to get beer below 2.50 apart from one or two self-professed anarchist establishments, so I don’t know how rigorous a source Numbeo is either.
It's tough for me to know how engineering salaries stack up, I'm only hiring in Amsterdam and haven't looked deeply at what London markets look like. At least at the high end, they tend to be relationship and individual market driven.
At a macro level, payscale has some interesting comparisons
here with N> 250 each.
For beers: I think you're looking at the "Grocery section", Beers are priced at 4 euros in the "Restauraunt" zone. I will, in actuality, buy you a delicious <4 euro beer at one of a few bars around our office. I don't know how many other consumer indices are backed by a personal guarantee.
