> Paying a junior employee $100k? "We can't do that, the agency director has worked here for 40 years, and he doesn't make that much."

I can assure you that junior software engineers in Italy or anywhere else in the EU make nowhere near that amount of money. In fact, few of even the most senior software engineers make that amount of money anywhere in the EU (in Switzerland or the UK they might see such salaries, at the higher tiers).

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alberto-m 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> in Switzerland they might see such salaries, at the higher tiers

Putting UK and Switzerland in the same pot is wrong, the pay scales are totally different. 100k$ is 80k CHF which is entry level salary for a SWE. The difference between Switzerland and US is at senior level (reaching 160k CHF is much more difficult than reaching 200k$).

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miki123211 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The figures I gave were in-line with the US (as that's what most of this audience understands), but if you scale everything by a certain factor, the entire principle holds basically anywhere.

	▲	tsimionescu 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not really. US programming salaries are much higher than most other engineering and specialist positions, which makes it harder for the government to hire good programmers. However, programming salaries here in the EU are much more in line with other specialist salaries, which the government already hires many of. So there is no significant problem in hiring programmers at competitive rates for government work. The bigger problem, and the reason this doesn't usually happen, is just ideological opposition to state services, preferring to contract out this type of work instead of building IT infrastructure in-house.

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Nextgrid a day ago | parent | prev [-]

And they get exactly what they pay for. There's zero reason for a competent professional to stick around with that kind of pay any longer than strictly necessary (aka until their own gig or freelancing takes off).

	▲	angry_octet a day ago \| parent [-]
		Many people don't want to live in America. I know that if you're American that sounds crazy.