Author is in a personal bubble and doesn't know it. Most of my European programmer friends make less than their sales department. I bet it must be the same in most of asia, india, etc.
Living in EU and having changed a few countries in the last decade, I can confirm this. Programmers are paid absolutely average salary, typically less than most other engineering professions.
Programmers being highly paid must be an US thing.
Consultants can certainly be paid (way) more than average, but this is not something I've seen for regular employee positions.
"Pay is low in Europe" isn't really true. It's a statement based on the (very frequent, deliberate and problematic) conflation of the EU with Europe. Wages for programmers are pretty high in parts of the UK, Switzerland, and some other places. In provincial Germany or French classical engineering firms, yes sure, wages are much lower. But then developer wages outside of California are nothing special in the USA either.
I'm not sure about California, but as I was interviewing for some positions in Zurich, the wage adjusted for cost of living in there, and excluding Google (which has a presence there), is also average. I lived in Paris for some years and the same was true. I have several friends scattered across Spain, Germany and France in several big cities and nobody is getting rich. Maybe I'm missing the cool working positions.
I never ran any estimate for London since I never had an opportunity to work there.
