"Now, the average non-software senior engineer in those countries gets around 45K euros/year."
For Industrial Engineering (the most common) it's €18k-€22k when you finish the 6-year degree (4+2), and if you go so far as to become "project director" with some extra qualifications you get €71k/year (which is literally a "director-level" position). I'd say that these are rare enough to be well matched with the few people making €100k+ working for a company abroad.
One of the problems is that there is a lot of self-taught developers, where they make that same "junior" salary of 18k-22k after 1-2 years of a bootcamp or learning on their own. So this brings the whole average down, but for the same amount of experience (studies+work) I'm pretty confident a software developer makes 1.5x-2x that of an Industrial Engineer for all of their _technical_ careers.
That's another thing that reduces the effective wage in europe: it's much more common to go to grad school (for engineers)
Effectively no one in the US gets a master's in CS, other than immigrants who get higher priority and possibility different visas (think like O-1) with said degree, so it makes sense for them. There are certainly PhD students, but they tend to genuinely want to do research IME rather than just do more school for more money down the line.
For Industrial Engineering (the most common) it's €18k-€22k when you finish the 6-year degree (4+2), and if you go so far as to become "project director" with some extra qualifications you get €71k/year (which is literally a "director-level" position). I'd say that these are rare enough to be well matched with the few people making €100k+ working for a company abroad.
One of the problems is that there is a lot of self-taught developers, where they make that same "junior" salary of 18k-22k after 1-2 years of a bootcamp or learning on their own. So this brings the whole average down, but for the same amount of experience (studies+work) I'm pretty confident a software developer makes 1.5x-2x that of an Industrial Engineer for all of their _technical_ careers.