Why are SWE in the US more expensive than SWE in Europe?

The US engineer you mentioned does t want to work with people for whom cost is a concern. Those clients are annoying to work with.

When I did contract work this was my strategy.

I guess $25k quote was to test the ground how serious you are. I personally would not touch $1k project, considering how much of a hassle it is to maintain it later.

Quality of life is much easier and cheaper here in EU so, in general, our standard of life doesn't cost as much. I generally assume that a dev salary here is equivalent to a salary in the US that is about 2x. So we are cheaper cause half the salary here gives us a really nice life somewhat similar to what someone would have in the US at 2x.

> now most software engineers are using AI Copilot and ChatGPT in their work

Citation needed. I doubt we’re at the level of “most”. And if we are, I worry (even more) for the quality of future software.

You received two quotes and you assess US developers are 16x more expensive than European developers? I assess your venture is not likely to succeed.

> This on top of now most software engineers are using AI Copilot and ChatGPT in their work which means that most quotes and salaries look very overpriced.

So, why don't you use these services and do the work yourself then?

I think one of the more obvious reasons is because companies genuinely believed in the benefit of geographical colocation. And Tech has largely been a winner takes all industry, so paying large sums of more money to hire people is worth it because they payoff is huge, and if you're not #1 you're likely bust.

For better or worse American Tech workers have decided to voluntarily give up (nay, aggressively demanded to get rid of) the geographical colocation advantage. Assuming the whole RTO movement doesn't work out (and with the resistance one can see I expect it not to, especially when office leases come up for renewals and decision makers are like, why pay for the office when we can sell not paying for it and offloading costs to workers as an advantage to them, and they're not coming in anyways), I suspect we will find out the truth of this hypothesis within a decade as American salaries converge with global salaries.

That's assuming AI doesn't make us all unemployable of course.

If you want a simple website for, say, a local business, then a service like Squarespace or Shopify probably does what you want. Programming ability may not be necessary.

If you want something much more custom than that built from scratch, then I strongly doubt that you can get it done for $1-2k competently no matter where the developer is located.

To use a (somewhat poor) analogy, there’s a big difference in price between pre-built cabinets from IKEA and custom-built cabinets that exactly fit your space using your preferred materials and finishes even though both are just basic wooden boxes with doors that open.

AI has not impacted developer wages yet as far as I know. Pay expectations may have fallen a bit, but that’s got more to do with layoffs caused by interest rate increases.

Because SWE engineers in Europe are underpaid.

You create a software product you can sell it anywhere not like you are bound by the country. This gets exploited by European startups that hire much cheaper talent and offer much cheaper services to US customers.

I'm going to share an unpopular opinion: US engineers are drastically overpaid, living off easy VC money for too long. We're not that much better than our foreign peers (if at all). We just live in an epicenter of speculatory investment, with easy money and careless spending meant to give the illusion of early success prior to an IPO or acquisition.

The bubble finally burst and thousands were laid off, and the market is correcting itself slowly. Hopefully salaries will come back down to earth.

US techies are hated for a reason, because we're drastically overpaid compared to the skill and education that it takes (vs other white collar jobs) and we drive up costs of living for everyone else while contributing much less to society than your average doctor or engineer.

Covid made matters worse (I nearly doubled my salary switching companies during that time, although it was never my intent). The intensity of demand fueled even more unrealistic salaries, followed by even more intense layoffs.

In this environment, especially with our lack of social safety nets, you can't easily make a small and stable tech company that wants sustainable business instead of hypergrowth. Every startup aims to be the next Alphabet / OpenAI, instead of meeting some practical need in a niche.

The US has always been a gilded society with the capitalists driving society and economy, and we just happen to be higher up that pyramid for the time being, as their latest minions. Not because we are that special or that great, but just because they need us (for now) to recoup their investments. We're just pampered pawns in a sinister game, destroying cities and communities in our wake.

I'm glad Europe doesn't have the same mentality. Don't copy us.

You get what you pay for. Good european engineers have US rates.

There's another possibility that I didn't see here.

I usually help people hiring developers and when you get quotes that are that different with people on similar seniority levels it's usually because the requirements aren't specified enough.

1. Silicon Vally carries a lot of weight to a point it increases prices outside of it

2. Venture Capitalism has gone wild in the US

3. the true cost of living, as in if you want proper health insurance + healthy living + security/peace of mind in the US is can be quite high, much higher then in the EU even through taxes are much lower (creating a huge gap between what seems to be the cost of living if you don't look into details and what is)

4. UK is not in the EU anymore, and the effect of leaving it are starting to hit hard

I had a project that a US developer wanted 4x the money and 10x the duration for a really small project. I went with the eastern european developer and it was fine.

The eastern european developer outsourced the project to India too when i read the code signature, which I laughed about.

cost of living in large metros in the US is easily x4 of what it is in western europe.

also websites in western europe can easily be 10-25k if you work with an agency.

you are wrong that real software engineers use AI tools primarily to write code.

It probably comes down to large US corps simply having more money. Since they're in competition with each other they pay more to get and sometimes even hoard devs.

> This on top of now most software engineers are using IDE Autocompletion in their work which means that most quotes and salaries look very overpriced.

I didn't realize inflation was that bad in the US!

1 or 2k seems fishy.