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Software is a major employeer in Europe. In Stockholm programmer is the most common job for men. The numbers vary wildly when I google but there are millions of developers in the EU.
The issue is that the devs in Europe don't end up in fields with high growth potential. Many end up writing code for car companies, banks and government. There are lots of devs working for traditional industries or maintaining a billing system. To a great extent it is a mindset issue. Our financial elites try to run tech companies as if they were running a steel mill and end up with great software for their industrial products. However, it doesn't scale. A hospital record keeping system isn't going to turn into a trillion Euro company.
Much of the blame should be placed upon the business community. There really needs to be two business schools, one for tech and one for traditional industries. The mindset among investor in Europe is so far from the silicon valley mindset.
If someone tried to pitch open AI to a European investor they would be focused on how it can be sold to mid sized companies by a sales team and what the profit margin of that would be. Then they might pitch in 500k Euros.
Inversely, it feels like the "tech industry" is eating American software and other areas of the economy are often left in sort of a software desert. We come in as Europeans and think we have garbage solution and surely noone in America could ever want our garbage, only to discover that it's somehow, unfathomably, even worse in the US.
Obviously the tech industry is fabulously financially successful but sometimes I wonder if it would be better if it was a bit less profitable so American software talent could be spread a bit more evenly throughout the economy.
It's what are called "H-1B dependent companies" (eg. WiPro, Infosys) and directly hired H-1Bs who eat the lower end of American software -- the people writing boring bespoke business logic for companies in other industries. Big Tech isn't killing them; it did kill some of the IT support infrastructure for some of those companies (since you don't need it to rent machines on AWS/Azure; only "some" of those companies as others are not willing to give up physical control of their machines for various reasons)
I mean "killing" them by eating the talent. They didn't disappear, the quality is just shockingly low.
Ah, yeah, maybe. Any programmer with enough talent to NOT do boring bespoke business logic probably won't, not only because the pay is higher in big tech (but very substantially that!)
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