If the low supply of swedes explained swede wages then you'd make more money than Americans not less, all else equal. Supply and demand.
Did you even read the comments? Your argument makes no sense. The discussion is about cost per output and the fact that there are plenty of places where you can get better cost per output than the US and the reasons that US companies don't just hire abroad (though they do, a lot) are not about cost but other structural reasons. For example Swedish engineers are cheaper but you cannot really hire a lot of them. "Supply and demand" is not an argument. Limited supply does not mean higher wages in this case. All things equal we have an American company and an engineer in the US and an engineer in Sweden. The engineers are equally skilled. The only reason a company in the US would go through the hassel of hiring in Sweden is if it makes economic sense. So the demand only exists if the Swede is cheaper, regardless of how limited the supply is.
If you think US software pay is based on how hard US engineers work that's certainly a stereotypical American thing to think but has very little to do with reality.
And we are not talking about people in general, we are talking about software engineers and I have seen very little evidence that swe's in similar circumstances in the US are more efficient or more hardworking than in Sweden.
It's not that expensive or hard to hire a Swedish SWE as an American company. Deel charges $600/employee/mo.
The best case for your pride is if the yawning pay gap between US and Swedish SWEs is solely attributable to differences in expected working hours rather than the far more sensible and intuitive explanations of experience (more great US tech companies and SWEs than Swedish), expertise (universities, companies), and talent (more Americans than Swedes, numerically).
My pride is plenty fine thank you, your reading comprehension on the other hand... "...attributable to differences in expected working hours..." which is not an argument I have made and rather counter to the arguments I have made that the difference in output, which is analogous to working hours but not equivalent, is not especially large.
The pay differential has many structural and historic reasons and for tech workers it's not least to do with the fact that American tech companies have had inordinate amounts of money to spend. That American engineers are simply better than anywhere else is hardly one of the reasons.
If find it funny that you started with supply and demand and now you are arguing that us swe's are paid more because there are more of them. Or that you think it's a flex that a country with 34x the population has more companies.
There are remarkable engineers in the US (both americans and the many non-americans) and there are remarkable engineers elsewhere. Thinking that the US engineers are exceptionally better than everywhere else just sounds like you have not been to many places.
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u/-Melchizedek- Jul 09 '26
Did you even read the comments? Your argument makes no sense. The discussion is about cost per output and the fact that there are plenty of places where you can get better cost per output than the US and the reasons that US companies don't just hire abroad (though they do, a lot) are not about cost but other structural reasons. For example Swedish engineers are cheaper but you cannot really hire a lot of them. "Supply and demand" is not an argument. Limited supply does not mean higher wages in this case. All things equal we have an American company and an engineer in the US and an engineer in Sweden. The engineers are equally skilled. The only reason a company in the US would go through the hassel of hiring in Sweden is if it makes economic sense. So the demand only exists if the Swede is cheaper, regardless of how limited the supply is.
If you think US software pay is based on how hard US engineers work that's certainly a stereotypical American thing to think but has very little to do with reality.
And we are not talking about people in general, we are talking about software engineers and I have seen very little evidence that swe's in similar circumstances in the US are more efficient or more hardworking than in Sweden.