| Umm, its not that they "Expect" 40-50K a year starting out, its pretty much a requirement. I mean thats about the least amount someone can make around here and "Survive". I'm still quite shocked that people think 40-50k a year is "Great Money". |
I rest my case. In a subsequent post, you even go so far as to say that $50k in California is "poverty level".
And hence many Americans price themselves out of the market.
As someone who hires people of all kinds of levels, it depends largely on their skill set which is usually part experience. I've hired plenty of people from other companies who were making far less than $40k per year. And I've hired people who make more.
There are a lot of variables involved. Our company, for instance, focuses on emerging technologies. I.e. we are developing things that didn't previously exist (games, desktop enhancements). So on average, it's a bit more enjoyable than the guy working for some mega insurance company.
But that also means that our customers (you guys) determine how much something can be sold for. And that in turn determines how much we can spend on it. Which in turn affects how much we can pay people to work on it.
If I make a product that will make $1 million during its effective lifetime, I obviously can't spend more than that if I want to stay in business. Since Americans don't really care that much about WHERE something is made, my products and services have to compete with products made by people all over the world (as well as with "freeware"). Look at all the people who bellyache'd last month about RightClick costing $14.95!
So how much we can pay someone is dependent on how much they produce. Typically, it takes quite awhile for someone to be able to produce high quality results in high enough quantity. Many (most) Americans aren't willing to go without. Like you said, they expect to come out of college and make $40k to $50k per year. Fine, they can expect whatever they want. But they don't have the skills necessary right out of college to justify that either because they weren't willing to learn on their own or their education was lacking.
The Americans we hire in the technology area typically start at far less. One, because we're a fun place to work at for most people and two, because we have a consistent record of rewarding those who increase their skills and output with significant increases in salary.
But where we can't find someone to do the job, we don't discriminate, we'll look to anyone we can and that increasingly means Europeans who are willing to sacrifice short-term for long term gain.
If Americans want to make the big bucks right out of college without fear of being outsourced then they need to dramatically increase their skills. And the first step would be to get our education system improved so that college graduates don't require a few years of training before they can produce anything of real value.
