incredibly narrow world view

I mean as someone who has experienced both the US and Europe I would say this applies to most everyone posting here.

And if we're going to sling insults then I'll say it's hilariously amusing how clearly fragile the egos of the people posting here are.

In the US I can quit a job with 0 days notice. I can also be fired from a job with 0 days notice and no severance.

That makes the job market significantly more fluid. If there is demand for a specific job compensation will go up quickly as there is no artificial buffer on people switching jobs for better pay. Supply and demand is very sensitive to small shifts in either. Companies are also not afraid of paying this compensation since worst case they'll just do some layoffs.

If a US company has some employees in Europe then they still have a benefit from all this so they can pay more than a purely European company. If they need to cut costs they can fire the expensive US employees first and then adjust the Europe comp more slowly. If they need to grow quickly they can do so in the US and then slowly shift to Europe.

edit: The profit margins of US tech companies are also massive as they have relatively little regulation, taxes or bureaucracy. Goggle makes $2 MILLION/employee/year. So no risk of not making record profits by paying an extra $200k.

You're right. But half this conversation is a bunch of people using random US stereotypes and downvoting anyone who says otherwise. Cost of living is fairly irrelevant when you've got an extra $200k/year post-tax to play with. And any company paying that much will give you really nice benefits including fully coverage health insurance and possibly a on-call concierge to help if you have any issues. Being poor in the US is really miserable but I also know people who can't see a doctor in Europe due to waiting lists (or their GP blocking it) and lack of money for private insurance. Neither case matters if you're an engineer. And France has the same rate of homelessness as California so neither has a happy community on average.

No, taxes are basically the same,

Source? Everything I've read indicates Europe has 15-20% more taxes for the same income. The tax rate in California for $100k would be 27% (total) and a 7% sales tax. Europe seems to be in the 45-50% range depending on the country and a roughly 20% VAT. Even the tax rate in California on $400k would be lower than the tax rate in Europe on $100k.

I mean you don't have to constantly job hunt but you have the option of doing so if you want to maximize money. And enough people doing so raises the compensation for everyone even if they don't job hunt constantly.

In my experience managing a large project comes down to having a consistent process/standards and enough experienced engineers in that language. Remove that and every single language leads to abominations.

In my sad experience, you don't but simply try to avoid getting caught in the blast radius of it failing. Someone approved/supported the project and someone approved/supported the sunk cost that already went into it. Those people have more power than you and they will not like looking bad due to you.

I would say part of being truly efficient in any role is being able to do the role efficiently even in less than ideal situations or with less than ideal coworkers.

In my personal experience significantly more people think they don't react emotionally than actually don't react emotionally so it's better to support each other than trying to inefficiently turn into machine together.

Got it. I would say respect is good but don't come off as too un-emotional since that might signal this isn't important for you. Showing you're upset at the situation is not a bad thing as long as you keep it in check and don't go off on a 10+ minute rant. A seasoned manager is used to people offloading emotionally on them so they won't take it personally (but they're also human so too much will stress them which you want to avoid). Some managers even go to the point of classifying the different kinds/phases of emotional offloading: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-update-the-vent-and-the-disaster/

As I see it perfect is the enemy of the good in this case. Rules, official or unofficial, on the "correct way" to do things stifle growth especially when there's few contributing users. That little extra barrier is enough to keep many people from even bothering at all. You want people to be engaged and excited rather than feeling they're beholden to a bureaucracy. Or worse beholden to an existing group of power users that control things by being the first or the loudest.

Conceptually, this is the outcome of companies owned by those who wish to maximize their investment. Eventually organic growth slows and it's time to squeeze more juice from the lemons they already have even if they need a hydraulic press to do it. The flip side is that without that investment money these platforms would probably not exist at the scale users are used to. It'll be interesting to see if the fediverse manages to scale well or not.

I feel trying to structure everything "perfectly" is just micro-management and is never going to be close to "perfect" for the usual reasons top-down everything never is. My general thoughts are:

• Employees should feel they are achieving autonomy, mastery and purpose. They'll work out all the details themselves if they're motivated and empowered to do so.
• To that effect teams should be able to do their end-to-end work without being blocked by/dependent on other teams 80% of the time. Not for 80% of each piece of work but 80% of pieces of work they put into production.
• The vision of the company/department and what rough path is being taken towards that vision (metrics, projects, goals, etc.) should be crystal clear to everyone.
• Incentives (promotions, yearly reviews, bonuses, etc.) at a corporate level should correlate with driving forward business value versus bureaucratic box checking.