Maybe there already lies another reason for the lower salaries - if you are from a country which traditionally had your company actually appreciate their employees and make them feel valued, and historically you just had to land your job and could expect to stay with the company the rest of your life, you will not be actively looking unless you get laid off. Loyalty on both sides is still quite common where I live.
Isn’t the question rather “why do US companies do that” when they could get away with paying less?
I can only speak for myself but I’m not keen on constantly job-hunting like I see so many US engineer advise. I’m looking for a more stable situation where the company seeks to hire long-term, and often in those cases you get benefits that are not monetary. Free access to partnered places like fitness studios or swimming pools can’t really be rolled into your salary, but if you use those often you end up with a financial benefit too. Automatical raises when your child is born is another.
Maybe it’s just a different culture, but I’ll trade in some base salary for a work environment based on mutual trust and goodwill.
This right here. I’ll gladly take less pay in Europe than constantly having to worry about my health and whether or not that bit of pain you sometimes have in a weird area means a hospital bill you can’t afford. And even if I loose my job, I know I will not starve, because of our social security system. It will not be fun, but I won’t loose my house or worry about what to eat tomorrow just because I got unlucky and my company went under.
My understanding of that article was that it was not necessarily about duplicated code, but duplicated data. If you have two places storing the same data, and different parts of your app go to each of it, you need to somehow keep them in sync, and that’s often a pain.
I’m trying to be very rigorous about avoiding that, duplicated code I’m a bit less rigorous about.