> my take is less salaries and more that most companies in Europe have been totally captured by the management/academic classes
I agree, but that's not too bad if management was ex-Engineers or ex-Product sales.
In most cases I've seen in Europe, they're just consultants or alumni of LDPs from a handful of elite programs, and line level Engineers or Sales Engineers don't get their due.
Inevitabely, the best European technical minds either migrate to the US or become Sales Engineers or Solutions Architects for American vendors.
> ou can't create what is fundamentally a highly technical product using management to tell engineers what to do
Amen to that.
> AWS' success is it enabled its _engineers_ to launch products. Which is why Azure sticks out like a sore thumb.
Azure's issues are due to their GovCloud compliance needs - almost all Fed cloud spend is Azure because they are almost always the first hyperscaler to guarantee FedRAMP compliant products for any cloud segment. This has the downside of features being hacky, because a significant portion of a team's effort is spent on FedRAMP related tasks.
> Inevitabely, the best European technical minds either migrate to the US or become Sales Engineers or Solutions Architects for American vendors.
There is always Switzerland for overall higher quality of life. Sums on paychecks themselves are meaningless if there is no underlying quality of life.
It's still American or Israeli companies though. Working for Google Zurich still means you're working for an American employer (though Google and other employers are increasingly shifting to Warsaw, Praha, and Romania due to tax incentives and employees with less of an ego).
Why work for SAP as a Cloud Engineer earning $45-60k in Waldorf and required to go in-person when Wiz or AWS can pay you $90-110k as a Partner Cloud Architect while letting you work remotely in Waldorf and travel may 10-20% to customer onsites in Frankfurt or Berlin or EMEA partner conferences in Praha or Amsterdam.
The point is one way or the other, you don't have a choice other than to work for an American or Israeli company in some way or the other in most of Europe's tech scene, and incorporation remains extremely difficult. I've met so many French and Germans who committed aliyah explicitly because they could earn 2x in TLV what they could in Paris or Berlin, or because it was easier to create a startup. And for non-Jewish Europeans America has remained somewhat easier (unless your Polish, Romanian, or Czech/Slovak - in which case Eastern Europeans have a similar hustle and founder culture, as most operators worked in American bigtech or VCs)
I agree, but that's not too bad if management was ex-Engineers or ex-Product sales.
In most cases I've seen in Europe, they're just consultants or alumni of LDPs from a handful of elite programs, and line level Engineers or Sales Engineers don't get their due.
Inevitabely, the best European technical minds either migrate to the US or become Sales Engineers or Solutions Architects for American vendors.
> ou can't create what is fundamentally a highly technical product using management to tell engineers what to do
Amen to that.
> AWS' success is it enabled its _engineers_ to launch products. Which is why Azure sticks out like a sore thumb.
Azure's issues are due to their GovCloud compliance needs - almost all Fed cloud spend is Azure because they are almost always the first hyperscaler to guarantee FedRAMP compliant products for any cloud segment. This has the downside of features being hacky, because a significant portion of a team's effort is spent on FedRAMP related tasks.