The big question is why do other societies (I'm not American) not value engineering. And when I say "value", I mean "with money".
Some professions push society forward and create long-term wealth. In my mind these are professions where you make decisions with skin in the game, persuade others to do things a better way, and all of STEM. Leadership, sales, engineering, science.
Other professions exist to describe what these prime movers do, or to maintain their work, or to support the people doing it. This is also vital and every society needs this too, but it's just not as important.
So, if in the USA they pay engineers 3x better than in other countries, the question is: what the hell is the rest of the world thinking?
Countries like India, China, Israel, and South Korea also have tech industries that can pay EU level salaries (and in Israel's case US level) despite a cost of living comparable to Eastern Europe (excluding Israel).
The reason is those counties and the US have an oversized software+hardware industry with a very mature VC+PE+IPO market within the tech sector or a pipeline to the US's financial sector, and are thus able to make 8-9x multiples of revenue based on a single IC.
Most of the EU doesn't have software+hardware companies with comparable revenue multipliers. That said, in certain niches (eg. Pharmaceuticals, Finance, Defense) in some regional employment markets like those in the UK, Denmark, Netherlands, and Ireland might be able to offer US comparable salaries (not SV level but a decent $70-100k base)
> what the hell is the rest of the world thinking?
— “Who wants to work that hard for nothing?”
— “We’re a tech company? What do we actually do? Something that: atomizes social relations; enables the violation of people’s privacy and rights; or simply plays hot-potato with funny money? Yeah, pass. My friends and family would think I’m a chancer.”
— “What you’re doing goes against local laws and ethics. You can’t do that here.”
— “A business should help the country and its people; not the people that built it.”
— “Spending all my free time to become marginally more knowledgeable and skilled than my coworkers/‘competition’? I’d rather spend time with my friends and family — or a hobby.”
— “Money? What am I gonna do with money — buy a house? Then what.”
STEM professions are important, but I disagree that they're not valued enough. If anything, the US is overvaluing them compared to the rest of the world.
Education and health professionals are much more valuable to society, and it's criminal how little they're paid in general. Sure, they ultimately depend on STEM fields, but without them our societies would literally collapse. The "prime movers" as you put it depend much more on health and education professions than the other way around.
We only need teachers because they generate STEM grads. No science would mean 90% of the value in education is gone. There's obviously value in learning history and English, but it's nothing transformative.
Until recently, the medical profession was literally leeching people until STEM stepped in with germ theory etc. The life expectancy value of going to the doctor was negative!
The US pays salespeople, leaders, entrepreneurs, and engineers a ton of money. And it shows in the results.
> We only need teachers because they generate STEM grads.
Only? No professions would exist without teachers. Education is fundamental to our society, and has been for millenia. There's nothing more transformative than a good education.
> No science would mean 90% of the value in education is gone.
Again, I'm not saying that science is not important. It plays a critical role in driving other fields forward. But I'd argue that an average teacher and health care worker are more valuable to society than an average IT professional, while the discrepancy in pay between them is abysmal. We only care about health care workers in times of crisis, but then quickly forget about them when it's not trendy to call them "heroes" anymore.
> Until recently, the medical profession was literally leeching people until STEM stepped in with germ theory etc.
I'm not talking about scientific breakthroughs that push other fields forward. Those obviously deserve the merit and recognition they have received. I'm talking about the value of the average working class professional in these fields, and their relative salaries.
> The US pays salespeople, leaders, entrepreneurs, and engineers a ton of money. And it shows in the results.
What results? How is a software "engineer" working for an adtech or social media giant to build spyware valuable to society exactly? Or yet another startup peddling their bullshit product designed to lure in investors and make their shareholders rich? Or the sleazy sales people making all those deals happen? You're telling me that this is somehow more valuable than health workers literally saving people's lives, or teachers building future professionals?
One group lives in luxury, while the other can barely make ends meet working a much more stressful and laborious job. This shows in the results, alright.
Thinking that somehow our profession is more important is indicative of the tech bubble we're in. But I'm not surprised to see such mentality on this forum.
This belief is a big part of why we have such a crisis of culture and politics today.
Education in civics and humanities are vital for understanding our culture, other cultures, ourselves, other people, our relations to them, and how best to participate in our society and government.
Education in practical skills—the kind that used to be taught in "home ec" courses—is vital for being able to navigate this world safely and effectively—things like how to make basic foods, how to balance finances, etc.
I agree that there's a lot of value in civics as you call it. I'm not saying it should be cut out.
But if it weren't for leaders, salespeople, and STEM, we'd still be throwing rocks at sabre-tooth tigers; naked, hungry, sick, and hoping for the best.
Nearly every good thing in our world exists because we invented it, or invented a way to use a natural thing. Everything in home ec and all of bookkeeping were created and spread by prime movers.
The past few centuries of economic growth were ushered in by the industrial revolution, a staggering increase in global wealth culminating with people so rich that they have time to question the value of STEM, and with so few problems that they think what we're living through right now qualifies as a political crisis.
I love how STEM has basically just been reduced to TE (and maybe M, but it’s more of a tangential thing) colloquially. My understanding that the “S” in particular are not very valued, and that there’s way more supply than demand in most of the sciences.
My salary is decent, but our family paid $48k out-of-pocket for medical care last year, and our kids enter college soon; some colleges in the US are over $60k/year now. In Europe, my salary would be lower... but so would my medical and college costs.
$2400/month premiums ($2800 this year), $4k in copays (capped), uncovered compounded medications, an out-of-network provider because the in-network ones have a year's wait, dental/braces/vision, etc. (Plus mileage/parking incurred with a medically complex family.)
If your base of comparison is Berlin, then Tier 1 metros in the US can come out to 3-4x as expensive, but Germany also has pretty bad wage stagnation so ymmv
I agree (Munich, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Cologne-Bonn take the cake in DE economically while Berlin is a relative newcomer), but when Americans talk about Europe, the image that comes to mind is going to either be Berlin or maybe Paris (yes Ireland+UK are Europe as well, but they aren't exactly treated as European in the American zeitgeist).
That said, Berlin is definetly much cheaper than other cities due to the Cold War. It's basically Western+Central Europe's Austin.
I know this is supposed to be a "self-awareness jab" at HN commenters, but you should really take a look at the stock market. 7 of the top 10 companies by market value are American tech companies. If anything, American IT workers are severely underpaid compared to the profits these companies are raking in.
These companies are raking record profit because they've managed to place themselves as de facto monopolies in their respective areas. The software world is a winner-take-all in nature, where the last man standing becomes a super profitable monopoly (SV prefers the term "the moat" instead of monopoly). It has little to do with the workers of these companies and everything with the lack of regulation of the tech sector.
But that means the work being done at those companies is more valuable than the work being done elsewhere, and so it makes sense that those companies would pay more (because marginally better employees will add even more value than they cost, due to the org's over-size leverage of that work). That in turn raises salaries for all workers in the same market.
That very well may be true, but I would rather the workers still get paid concomitant to the profits the corporation is raking in rather than even more wealth being accumulated by the capital class running these corporations.
I think you mean well. Though this comment does remind me of situation during Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Many startup founders were shocked to discover how large part of America hate these hardworking entrepreneurs for no fault of theirs.
