Agreed. Personally, I would love to move to Denmark, and I am actually on the job market right now (I do scientific computing with Python and some related data engineering tools, so I have no idea if I fit the OP's company) but my immediate instinct is to be really skeptical of this.
For me to feel like a job offer to Copenhagen is attractive, the take-home pay needs to be similar to what it would be in Boston in the US ... so mid to high 100k USD range of gross pay, say something close to 100k USD take-home pay, which roughly corresponds to a take-home pay of 688k Danish krone per year. With high taxes there, I'm guessing this means a salary of greater than 1MM krone/year to be roughly equal to a competitive offer in a mid-cost urban area in the US. And if it is in the finance industry as the OP suggested in another comment, then there should be some opportunity for profit sharing as well.
Cost of living doesn't factor into this so much, though cost of living in Scandinavian cities is pretty high. There is career risk and visa / tax hassle to worry about, relocation and housing costs, and the usual start-up risk. It's not at all the same as taking on a risk in the Bay area, where there are many jobs to switch to if your company doesn't work out.
I think a lot of start-ups don't consider these things, and often they don't have to consider them because there's a line of schmucks down the street waiting to work for them.
But if you are a thoughtful person and you consider visa risk, tax risk, career risk, relocation risk, regular start-up failure risk, etc., then for a job like this you might even expect a significant premium when compared to US-based jobs in the same field. A lot of European start-ups, I find, don't fundamentally think this way, and they expect that American workers should be happy to accept "European" salaries, which are then taxed at a higher rate, all while you're bearing many additional risks.
Unless your personal preference function puts a huge, huge premium on the status of "living in Europe" then it's probably a bad deal in terms of net life happiness.
This line of thinking is spot on. Face it, European salaries are just extremely low.
I personally know of several awesome EU engineers working remotely for bay area startups, earning bay area salaries. Now THAT is attractive. Usually it means they're self employed, but they're easily making €8,000 after tax (+ they can tax deduct all their tech goodies!)
Now, why would I take that €40,000 gross/year job again? (this doesn't just apply to startups, btw, it applies to most tech jobs in Europe)
What makes it even more egregious is that some of the absolute best engineers on the planet are in Europe. It is a powerhouse of design talent, the birthplace of tons of pivotal scientific ideas, has many bastions of functional programming, and so on.
Some of those people choose to move to the US, but surely many great engineers choose to remain there for cultural or family reasons.
As someone interested in the efficient allocation of talent across the whole planet to help for the overall betterment of the world, it's upsetting to me that their random family associations or random cultural ties means they get paid significantly less money than lesser skilled people who just so happen to be near a lucky geographic spot.
European salaries are low, and it is unreasonable that they are low. It would be great if more American companies began hiring remote workers from Europe to arbitrage away this silly wage differential and put pressure on European capital to grow up a little and start being competitive.
Agreed, there is a lot of talent in Europe. Most European companies don’t realise they can put together an amazing team if you pay engineers $100-150k a year. They think having more people at lower salaries is better than fewer people at higher salaries.
Second to that is that a lot of established, larger companies don’t realise this either. I’ve happen to have had talks with the CEO of a €1bn revenue apparel company, and they have trouble hiring talent. I told them to start with a small team of highly skilled people (+ paying them really well) and build their digital capabilities around that. The CTO, who was in charge of this, basically laughed my idea out of the room and said they needed to hire 150+ new technical people to become a digital leader. In the next year. Why? ‘Cause more developers will solve the problem.. :)
Realistically, they needed 15-20 great people to support the digital side of that entire business, at most.
That sounds tragic, especially since it has been well-known even since the time of Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month that small teams are often much better than large teams, and that team productivity does not scale at all linearly with team size, probably more like the log of team size, so there are major diminishing returns.
I wonder how much of this is related to status effects. I used to work in a quant finance shop that cared desperately about the way their tech team looked on paper. The credentials and degrees each hire possessed were often much more important than practical skill -- even though technical problems were hugely business critical to the firm, and it wound up that a small number of competent engineers handled the majority of important work.
But, whenever the firm was entertaining new prospective clients and they could walk them through a big cubicle bank full of fancy Ivy grads furiously typing, the status effect translated into real money for the firm's higher level management and senior executives.
I can't say they were being irrational -- I guess the burden falls to the customers being irrational in their impressions of what engineering is supposed to look like?
It was. Especially since it means they’ll be throwing €10-30m down the drain over the next few years with this strategy. I expect the CTO to be long gone before they realise that. In general, in BigCo, the more people you have under you in the org. chart, the more power you wield. It's ridiculous though.
In defence of the CEO, in most cases, more people means faster and/or better production. He was extremely capable (I was impressed, he really knew his stuff), and he knew what he wanted to achieve when it came to the company’s digital presence. With proper BigCo resources, not all that hard to achieve I think.
Second, it also probably had to do with the fact that the CTO was just unable to agree with me. It’s a family business (I’m friends with someone of the family), and if he agreed with what I said, he would’ve basically been admitting he couldn’t do the job. So in that regard he probably thought I was posing a significant risk to his continued employment. The CEO was someone of the family + a significant shareholder.
Interesting. How did they find the roles? I'm self employed and operate my own UK limited company as a contracting vehicle. Working for Bay Area start ups sounds attractive...
For me to feel like a job offer to Copenhagen is attractive, the take-home pay needs to be similar to what it would be in Boston in the US ... so mid to high 100k USD range of gross pay, say something close to 100k USD take-home pay, which roughly corresponds to a take-home pay of 688k Danish krone per year. With high taxes there, I'm guessing this means a salary of greater than 1MM krone/year to be roughly equal to a competitive offer in a mid-cost urban area in the US. And if it is in the finance industry as the OP suggested in another comment, then there should be some opportunity for profit sharing as well.
Cost of living doesn't factor into this so much, though cost of living in Scandinavian cities is pretty high. There is career risk and visa / tax hassle to worry about, relocation and housing costs, and the usual start-up risk. It's not at all the same as taking on a risk in the Bay area, where there are many jobs to switch to if your company doesn't work out.
I think a lot of start-ups don't consider these things, and often they don't have to consider them because there's a line of schmucks down the street waiting to work for them.
But if you are a thoughtful person and you consider visa risk, tax risk, career risk, relocation risk, regular start-up failure risk, etc., then for a job like this you might even expect a significant premium when compared to US-based jobs in the same field. A lot of European start-ups, I find, don't fundamentally think this way, and they expect that American workers should be happy to accept "European" salaries, which are then taxed at a higher rate, all while you're bearing many additional risks.
Unless your personal preference function puts a huge, huge premium on the status of "living in Europe" then it's probably a bad deal in terms of net life happiness.