Comment by alper

> that highly paid programmers in the US also brought in a ton of profit

In Germany for instance I've seen many a company that treated their programmers as a cost center and they actually were (probably a mutually reinforcing self-fulfilling prophecy).

Too many instances of programmers being deployed in such a way that I couldn't possibly see a way that they would get back even that meagre investment that was being made. Fully irrational dev teams doing useless busy work.

Most German "startups" used to be replaceable with Zapier and Pipedrive. That has probably only gotten worse with the advent of LLMs.