When our goal is high paying software engineering jobs, we hardly think of Germany, France or the Netherlands. The first names and areas that spring to mind are Silicon Valley, San Francisco and New York. The fact is that the US is probably where an IT talent can make a lot of money. The average salary for software engineers in the US is $110,140 compared to $52,275 in Germany.

Yes, that’s a difference we can’t ignore. But let’s jump to conclusions and rush to conclusions about IT pay in Europe because nothing is as it seems. When we take a look at the top earning companies in Europe, you’ll notice that they are the ones paying much more than those overall figures you saw above.

If we want to grow in the most lucrative sector in technology, we need to consider a number of factors. Location is obviously among the most important. For example, the highest salaries in Western Europe are in the Netherlands.

The size of the company, its funding and the location of its headquarters are also important. Here are also the highest paid types of tech companies in Europe, according to We Are Developers.

The Four Types of TECH Companies in Europe with the Highest Salaries

FinTech
FinTech covers everything related to money online. This includes mobile banking, payment processing services, post-payment, wallet management, trading platforms and even cryptocurrencies. Major European companies in this field are N26, Solaris, SumUp, Klarna, Wise, Wirecard. The highest annual salary for a senior engineer is 605,000 euros.

FAANG
We all know that the FAANG companies (Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google) in the US offer very competitive salary packages. In Europe, it’s no different. According to We Are Developers, FAANG companies tend to offer a higher base salary, but less in terms of equity and bonuses. The highest pay package is €255,000.

Cloud Software
At the risk of sounding mercantile, there’s a lot of money in the cloud space. Plus, the big players are legacy companies like IBM and Oracle. Bay Area international cloud companies pay the highest salaries. Companies like HashiCorp and Databricks. The highest reported remuneration package is €335,000.
Travel sector

It may surprise many to learn that software engineers in the travel sector have the highest earnings in Europe. It actually makes sense when you consider the business model and how big companies like booking.com, Trivago and Skyscanner are. They pay their developers well. According to Techpays, the highest remuneration package is €455,000.

Companies Unicorns
These are the companies that reach billion dollar status, pay their senior developers well. Uber is a notable name in this category. In the last few years, there are also several European companies that have become unicorns: Zalando, Bolt, Hopin, Personio, Vinted and Gorillas. According to Techpays, the highest remuneration package is 374,000 euros.

The Beginning – When everything finally falls into place
When Nadine Selim interviews for her dream position at Amazon, she hesitates until the last minute whether to accept it and leave her old job, which is just as good as the future offer. During this same time, Nadine is about to have one of her most exciting moments – becoming a mother. Yet she gets the job at Amazon and leaves her old position.

The tech industry and the support it provides to expectant parents
Back then, she still had no worries about being pregnant and the likelihood of losing her job when she gave birth, as she knew about the good maternity leave benefits offered by the tech giants. Benefits that many believe are partly designed to attract more members of the fairer sex into the male-dominated tech industry. And when the most long-awaited and emotional moment came for Selim, and every woman and mother-to-be – she stepped away from work for a while on maternity leave.

The email that clouds the happiness of a mother
But just a few weeks after that, Selim received an email saying she was being laid off. And so she became one of the hundreds of thousands of employees who were laid off by companies that offered good working conditions.

The tech industry and the promise it broke?
According to Slate, among the mass layoffs that have taken place in the tech sector in recent months, the number of laid-off women is quite large, and even many of them have received the unpleasant memo while on maternity leave, and Selim is one of them.

Some time ago, we told you about the story of a man, again an employee at a large tech company, who lost his job during fatherhood. The tech industry doesn’t seem to take into account the social situation of its employees, and the redundancy trend, which is slightly contained for now, threatens every single member of it, whether they are in a high position, have a lot of experience or have just become a parent and need support.

According to the report, market and economic conditions are the leading reason for the cuts. Other reasons include cost cutting, restructuring and artificial intelligence. 46 900 people have been laid off this year without companies specifying a reason.

In May alone, U.S. employers laid off 80,089 people. That’s 287% more than in the same month last year, when companies announced 20,712 layoffs. That’s the highest January-to-May job cuts since 2020, when 1,414,828 people were laid off.

The technology sector had the most layoffs this year, followed by the retail sector, the automotive sector and financial firms.

According to Business Insider, this is the first time artificial intelligence has been included as a reason for job cuts. Challenger, Gray & Christmas expects this trend to continue, although some companies are still reluctant to admit they are laying off employees and eliminating positions because of AI.

A recent Goldman Sachs report states that artificial intelligence could replace 300 million full-time jobs globally, which is a quarter of current jobs

Another new service called “Live Speech” is expected, which allows users to enter a phrase and save commonly used phrases for the device to say during phone or FaceTime calls or in-person conversations.

Apple says it will use machine learning to create the voice within the device itself so that the data is more secure and private. The features listed are part of the company’s latest efforts to ensure accessibility. Apple pointed to conditions like ALS where people are at risk of losing their ability to speak.

“At Apple, we’ve always believed that the best technology is technology built for everyone,”

said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO.

“At the end of the day, the most important thing is to be able to communicate with your friends and family. If you can tell them you love them, in a voice that sounds like yours, that makes a big difference.”

Says Philip Green, a board member of the nonprofit Team Gleason, whose voice has changed significantly since being diagnosed with ALS, in a press release.

It’s not yet clear exactly when Personal Voice will be available, but Apple says it will happen before the end of the year.

The Samsung S23 Ultra is the standout model of the new smartphone line. Like its predecessor, the S22 Ultra, the S23 Ultra boasts a powerful 5000mAh battery and IP68 dust and water resistance, as well as 8GB or 12GB of RAM depending on configuration.

Key improvements
One of the key improvements in the S23 Ultra is its battery performance. The display now features more efficient materials and better adapts to a wider range of lighting conditions, resulting in improved battery life. The device’s battery efficiency is largely due to its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, which is specifically tuned for Samsung. It features an upgraded GPU with higher performance and better battery efficiency and boasts peak speeds of up to 3.36GHz from the Kryo CPU.

The phone has also attracted the attention of renowned British filmmaker Sir Ridley Scott, who used the device to create the short film “Behold,” and in a pre-recorded video shown at Samsung’s showcase, he highlighted the S23 Ultra’s ability to capture quality images even in shaky or unstable environmental conditions.

The other models in the Samsung S23 series have longer battery life.

Security and Privacy
When it comes to security and privacy, the Galaxy S23 series comes with Samsung’s comprehensive Knox security, which has received more government and industry certifications than any other mobile device, platform or solution on the market. The Samsung Galaxy Security and Privacy Dashboard gives users complete visibility into who has access to their data and how it is being used, allowing them to change settings for a more secure experience.

For one Google worker, it happened when the light on the card reader outside the New York office turned red instead of green.
For a Twitter employee, on the other hand, it was when his password was changed remotely and an unusual grey screen showed that his work Macbook was locked.
For Zack Bowling, a nearly eight-year veteran at Google, the firing represented an exit from all his devices.

In the past few months, tech companies have laid off tens of thousands of workers across the industry, which executives blame on overhiring during the pandemic. Almost without exception, companies have not handled their task particularly well, with casual brutality and tone-deaf displays – such as at Microsoft, which staged a private Sting concert in Davos the night before it fired 10,000 people. This is what Wired has to say on the subject.

“Finding out via email or auto-shutdown that you’ve lost your job is cruel – and it shouldn’t be. It’s also completely at odds with what many of these organizations are saying about how much they value their people.”

says Gemma Dale, a lecturer at Liverpool Business School and author of a number of books, including on employee wellbeing and flexible working in the field.

People who still work at the company aren’t sure if they’re next. Bowling says that workers who still have access to the company’s systems have told him that 8,000 names have disappeared from employee lists. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said it was laying off 12,000 people worldwide.

At Salesforce, 8,000 employees were laid off in January, but co-CEO Mark Benioff reportedly ducked out of questions at an all-employee meeting where the layoffs were to be addressed. At some companies – particularly Twitter, where Elon Musk has laid off entire teams as part of a 50 percent reduction in headcount – the layoffs appear arbitrary.

According to Carrie Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at Manchester University’s business school, attitudes towards staff have also deteriorated during the pandemic. Remote working has led to a greater divide between managers and their employees.

“There was less face-to-face contact and a lot more of their communications were virtual. This can create a situation where you don’t develop close relationships with your employees if you’re a direct supervisor.”

He says.

Even for those who have survived the cuts, the past few months have been a stark reminder that their well-being will never be more important than the fiduciary duties of managers, and that when times get tough, their positions are vulnerable.

Meta severed ties with a contractor that had been providing moderators for its African markets just weeks before the tech giant appeared in a Kenyan court to face charges of human trafficking and union-busting, Wired wrote on the subject.

The company has terminated its contract with outsourcing company Sama, which former employee Daniel Mothaung accused last year of imposing “unreasonable working conditions,” including irregular pay, inadequate psychiatric care and violating workers’ privacy.

But conditions at the company poised to take over the Meta contract look just as bad, if not more so. Meta has not confirmed which company will take over the new contract, but the Financial Times reported on 10 January that it is likely to be Majorel, a Luxembourg-based outsourcing company that already has content moderation contracts with Meta in Morocco and offices around the world.

TikTok and Meta moderators who have worked with Majorel described looking at hundreds of potentially traumatizing images a day without getting support from advisers. TikTok moderators in Nairobi say that while performance-based bonuses are possible, they are difficult to obtain, and those who complained about working conditions felt they were denied promotions and received poor evaluations. Moderators in the Nairobi offices also complained that they were not receiving monthly payslips to confirm their remuneration, but were instead being redirected to an online portal that was last updated in October.

Neither Meta nor Majorel responded to requests for comment.

Majorel officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, told WIRED that Meta executives visited Majorel’s Nairobi office in mid-January and told staff that the company would take on a contract with Meta.

Job listings on Fuzu.com, a platform for job postings in Africa, show that Majorel is currently hiring content moderators who speak Kirundi, Tigrinya, Oromo, Luganda, Kinyarwanda, Tswana, Afrikaans, Zulu, Amharic and Somali. Sama provides Meta moderation in most of these languages.

Overall, 65.6% of the total deal value came from late-stage venture capital funding rounds and “venture growth” rounds (the latter is a new pitchbook classification introduced to capture mid- and later-stage activity). But this is a small increase from 64.8% in 2021.

The value of foreclosures reached the third highest level on record (€38.3 million) despite the worsening economic conditions and lower valuations, but the more difficult conditions are expected to continue this year. Unfortunately, exit values have fallen dramatically compared to last year (€137.7m) and according to Pitchbook 63 public IPOs have raised just €13.4bn. This trend is likely to continue into 2023, making the prospect of a corporate takeover a more enticing choice.

For months, ByteDance has been working with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to establish the terms of a deal that would allow TikTok to continue operating in the U.S., with talks mainly focused on data storage and limiting China-based ByteDance employees’ access to U.S. user data. That arrangement envisioned TikTok partnering with Oracle to create a local data storage hub for U.S. users – but additional concerns have recently emerged about the way the app’s algorithm works.

“Conversations with U.S. authorities and lawmakers have become more pressing for TikTok in recent months as federal and state policymakers have taken steps to ban the app on government-issued devices. TikTok hopes that details of the planned reorganization – and promised measures to provide oversight of content recommendation algorithms – will convince potential allies in Washington of its ability to operate independently of its parent company, China-based ByteDance Ltd.”

reports The Wall Street Journal

This isn’t the first time TikTok has offered greater transparency on algorithms. Back in 2020, the global app announced plans to open a new transparency center in Los Angeles as part of its ongoing efforts to distance itself from concerns surrounding potential Chinese government interference. This is now an element of the ongoing negotiations, with the view being that by providing more information about its operations, it will reassure US officials about what’s happening at the app.

This could be a worrying development as it would effectively allow US officials to have some input into TikTok’s algorithmic process and potentially influence what the app does or doesn’t show users based on their assessment.

If ByteDance seeks to give U.S. employees a voice in the content that gains more popularity on the app, it may more closely resemble the Chinese model for Douyin, where employees reportedly have significant power over all aspects of the app’s operation.

Already 27 US states have banned TikTok on government-owned devices, as pressure mounts, ByteDance appears to be exploring more drastic measures to keep the app.

One thing is certain – TikTok will undergo significant changes in the coming months.

The IT giant will acquire this stake from a consortium made up of Blackstone and Thomson Reuters and will take a seat on the board of the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG). Such a deal would unite the exchange with one of the most powerful technology companies in the world, namely Microsoft.

“Advances in the cloud and AI will fundamentally transform how financial institutions research, interact, and transact across asset classes, and adapt to changing market conditions”

said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chair and chief executive.

Microsoft’s share purchases are likely to be welcomed by investors in LSEG, which is led by the chief executive, David Schwimmer. LSEG’s share price rose by 4% in early trading on Monday, making it the biggest riser on the FTSE 100.

Microsoft and LSEG said they had agreed a 10-year “strategic partnership for next-generation data and analytics and cloud infrastructure solutions”, overseen on LSEG’s board by Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive vice-president for cloud and artificial intelligence.

“We are delighted to welcome Microsoft as a shareholder. We believe our partnership with Microsoft will transform the way our customers discover, analyze and trade securities around the world, and create substantial value over time,”

said David Schwimmer, Chief Executive Officer at LSEG. 

LSEG will transfer its data processing and cloud services to Microsoft, as well as use its software for office work. It will also integrate the technology it offers to financial industry professionals with Microsoft.

This deal will cost LSEG between £250m and £300m in new cash outlays, and the company expects to spend at least £2.8bn on cloud services with Microsoft over the decade.