I'm not trying to specifically give you a hard time, but this needs to be called out in the public square until it stops being a hallmark of HN threads: you're passing off speculation and bald opinion as fact.
You don't know how competent the software engineers are in Europe, and saying "$140k for a software job is extremely high" is an arbitrary value judgment.
140k places you in the top 1-2% of the entire planet in earnings.
I can think of 2 US companies I know of off the top of my head that deliberately hire Europeans since they get talent at a steep discount (especially if you pay them remotely). From what I've seen Ukraine and Estonia are considered goldmines of cheap talent. I doubt they are the only ones.
Bald speculation and opinion would be that this massive imbalance between earnings is causally tied to merit to a degree strong enough that we can confidently say European software engineers are as a whole a whopping 50% less competent than US counterparts. This to me is ridiculous, not because it sounds offensive or anything, it's just obviously untrue for Europe. This is just how we've set up our geopolitics with downstream affects being massive imbalance between earnings of countries.
