Programming

You're replying in an antagonistic tone to anyone trying to answer your questions in good faith. You don't see the value in paying for a welfare system or income redistribution for the betterment of society as a whole, but many people do. Most of us want to not live in a dystopian nightmare where there are haves and have-nots depending on luck or misfortune. Not saying that the US is quite there, but there is a lot less of a societal buffer between you and total destitution after an adverse event there.

This is the reason why US employers have to pay more, they have to offer more due to the bigger inherent risk to every employee on a life basis (at-will employment, you're responsible for your own 401k and health insurance and education and transportation and remaining healthy and capable enough to work your whole life). If you can't be sure of your future source of income, you have to charge your employer more. This is also why consultants are paid better in Europe than direct employees, because consultants take a bigger risk.

One reason (among many) is that employment in American companies is less stable than in Europe with strong employment laws. Twitter could not do the same type of layoffs in Europe, with stories like this one being pretty common. But this safety net has a cost, and the cost is a part of total employment cost for employers. Whether the safety net is worth it for employees in IT, that's another matter—but it can't not be taken into account because of the law.

BTW, in some European countries there is a strong culture of IT workers doing long-term contractor work exactly to trade off employment laws for (usually quite a lot) higher wage.

many american companies being able to pay 200-400k usd a year while its hard to get past 100k usd in the richer countries of Europe

The way you word this makes it sound like it would be the opposite of “hard” to achieve 200k-400k in the United States.

What has convinced you that 200k-400k is some sort of average developer pay in the United States?

Cost of living in the USA is higher. We have very good stuff in Europe that if you want to get equivalent in the USA you need a lot of $ (uni degree, ex)

There's probably a bit of a disparity, but it's not nearly as much as you're making it out to be.

In the US it depends greatly on the industry and company - I don't know anybody making 200k-400k in software development (CTO? sure. Devs writing code? Nah), but I also don't know or work with anybody that's in FAANG world. Those are the companies paying $100k+ for a junior.

I live and work in a lower cost of living area, for a company that's not 'software first' and our juniors come in between $50k-75K. And that's not the lowest I've seen for junior engineers starting out.

That said - it's also not unusual for mid-career folks to be in the $100-150k range, and seniors/leads moving up from there.

So with all that in mind - some of it is market forces (are there more devs and/or fewer dev jobs in Europe than in the US? Potentially less mobility?) but one of the bigger causes (I'd guess, anyway) is the lack of FANG type "Master of the Universe" companies. Part of the reason juniors and seniors command that kind of pay in the US is because the rates that the FANGs pay tend to 'trickle down'. The average senior/mid career dev may not be interested (or capable!) of working at a FANG - but if the other people in their hiring pool are, they're still going to command that kind of salary.

As a point of comparison - my understanding is that financial services is sort of the same thing. Most Euro bankers/stockbrokers/finance bro types are pretty heavily underpaid compared to their US counterparts. Some of that is regulatory, but a lot of it is that there are more higher paying jobs in the US, mostly at the big multinantional conglomerates you can think of off the top of your head (Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citibank, JP Morgan), and that tends to drag the scale up throughout the whole system. A rising tide raises all boats.

Anyway - I don't have any research or statistics to back any of these suggestions up - hopefully Cunningham's Law gets us a 'real' answer. :)

One factor, in Europe a company’s expenses and taxes for you are higher paying into the social welfare system - which you do benefit from, so it works out. That US worker doesn’t have as good of public transportation system, healthcare insurance, and so on and need to make up for it.