2x-5x? Color me skeptical. Depending on what's behind that statement, it could actually be a bit insulting. I've been to US tech conferences; US developers aren't doing anything differently than the Northern European ones. Many times, I've heard discussions of at those conferences of processes that are more broken than the ones I wrestle with.
It's a combination of corruption, collusion, widespread inefficiencies that limits high salaries at the margins (meaning that the marginal company available to each employee is never desperate), very high pre-payroll hidden taxation. Also, importantly I think, a lack of competition between multiple globally dominant tech companies with huge profits per employee and a very obvious pathway to monetizing each additional employee's labor.
So, complex answer. But I'd stake money that collusion, often silently government-sanctioned, is significantly more common than in the US.
An example of this is very common in Norway, where practically all education is state-funded and the number of students for each profession is directly decided by the state. Private-sector interest groups have almost direct control over some of these processes, disguised as a public debate in the newspapers leading up to quota decisions. This leads to an almost planned economy of the availability of professionals.
It's a combination of corruption, collusion, widespread inefficiencies that limits high salaries at the margins (meaning that the marginal company available to each employee is never desperate), very high pre-payroll hidden taxation. Also, importantly I think, a lack of competition between multiple globally dominant tech companies with huge profits per employee and a very obvious pathway to monetizing each additional employee's labor.
So, complex answer. But I'd stake money that collusion, often silently government-sanctioned, is significantly more common than in the US.
An example of this is very common in Norway, where practically all education is state-funded and the number of students for each profession is directly decided by the state. Private-sector interest groups have almost direct control over some of these processes, disguised as a public debate in the newspapers leading up to quota decisions. This leads to an almost planned economy of the availability of professionals.