Comment by adav

8 years ago

Anecdotally, and when compared to America, it could be due to a combination of many factors including:

- More regulation around employee protection

- Excellent talent drawn from less wealthy EU states who may be willing to accept a slightly lower wage than locals

- Lots of STEM graduates from UK universities

- A different work life balance

- Tech skills are not seen as valuable as law/banking/medicine

- A more profit-first rather than growth-first startup mindset

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adav

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adventured  8 years ago

It's not STEM supply pushing down the salaries. Japan has fewer per capita stem graduates than the US, with a highly developed technical economy, and dramatically lower engineer salaries than the US (with a GDP per capita roughly the same as the UK).

  • meheleventyone  8 years ago

    This makes me think the question is better phrased the other way around. Why is SV compensation so high compared with the rest of the world?

    • barry-cotter  8 years ago

      A virtuous circle of people who make a fortune investing in other people hoping to make a fortune in the hope of making their fortune bigger. Silicon Valley is the place where agglomeration economics kicked in for information technology. That’s not really surprising. It had to be somewhere. Film has Hollywood, Finance has New York and London, Chemistry has the Rhineland, high fashion has Milan, Paris, New York and London.

      What’s special about Silicon Valley is that nowhere else comes close, that the minimum efficient scale for a great many software ideas is small, that it’s new, the addressable market is close to the entire global economy, and most importantly, they’re talent constrained, not capital constrained.

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