As a Software Engineer, is USA a better place to immigrate than Europe?

Introduction

I live in Chile, a country that has a high social unrest due to corruption. The violence between the government, the people against the government and the people in favor of the government is increasing.

So as many people do in the world, you turn your eyes towards countries that have for a long time been considered as the dreamland for many immigrants, North America and Europe.

Now, as a software engineer in the age of information, you are a more blessed than most, as you can actually make a choice about where to immigrate. With that in mind, let’s use the stack overflow survey data of 2017 to get an insight of where could be a better choice.

We will look at 3 questions:

Which location has the highest salary?

Which location has the highest salary growth?

which location has the highest career satisfaction?

The Data

Every year, Stack Overflow conducts a massive survey of people on the site, covering all sorts of information like programming languages, salary, code style and various other information. We will use the data from the 2017 survey to perform this study.

We will filter the data based on the following criteria:

The person is a professional developer

Working full time

Living in North America or Europe (for clarification purposes, North America is considered as USA and Canada)

Question 1: Which location has the highest salary?

One of the most important variables in a job offer, is the salary, since this can be translated as to how valued you are to the company. This is a core concern when analyzing the data, so we must be careful with outliers so we don’t provide false data.

To protect ourselves from outliers, we will use the median of the distributions of salaries between locations to compare.

As a first look we see the following graph:

Is easy to see that North America has a higher salary than Europe, but also, we want to do a master’s degree in the near future, so we want to understand if a higher degree of formal education brings a better benefit.

We can see that there is a correlation that is expected, a higher degree does bring you a higher salary, but is also easy to see that Europe still has a lower salary.

Question 2: Which location has the highest salary growth?

Ok, so we know that North America has the highest Salary, but we also should considered how valued is experience. It would not be ideal to stay with the same salary as our experience grows, or if I could peak my maximum salary 5 years earlier, that would alluring.

So for this, we need to have a clear idea of what we are plotting, since we already know that the magnitude of North America is higher than Europe. First of all, we want to compare the change rate between years, so that we can compare between locations in the same scale, since the starting and ending points are different in each continent.

Also, we want to have a cumulative sum of the change rate, to observe how much we have grown our salary from our starting point, as the time has passed.

With this in mind, we plot the data:

Well, this was unexpected, both locations have a similar behavior, with Europe having a slight advantage over North America.

Question 3: which location has the highest career satisfaction?

Finally, I also want to be happy with the work I do, but not only that, with my career choice. Jobs may change, but as long as I am happy with my specialty, I will be enjoy more my job, regardless of how good it is.

This is an important question, since if a career is treated as important in a country, than any job offer that comes your way will be interesting to say the least, not to say the treatment you would receive in your new workplace.

Finally, as we grow more experienced in our field of expertise, I would hope to not be disappointed.

We can see that North America has a higher satisfaction with their careers than Europe, but this graph can be a bit tricky, since it is showing visually that North America is much higher rated, but if you look at the axis, there is never a point in which the difference between both locations is over 1 point of satisfaction.

Still, we can see that both locations start in a pretty similar place, but then Europe has a drop that never really recovers from.

Conclusions

We have studied the data of the the 2017 stack overflow survey, we asked 3 important questions and analysed them. This is what we have concluded for each question

Which location has the highest salary?
We discovered that North America has the highest salary, regardless if you have a bachelor’s, master’s or PhD degree. This could be attributed to the quality of life in Europe, were education, health care and pension are higher rated than North America, but this is just a guess and escapes the scope of this study.

Which location has the highest salary growth?
Europe has a slight advantage over North America, but both locations follow a similar behavior.

which location has the highest career satisfaction?
North America has a higher rated career satisfaction, but also it is not by much. Europe has a drop during it’s middle years that keep it in the bottom, while North America has small increases in turn. So with this, we can say that North America has a better career satisfaction but it is not by a high difference.

So with these questions answered, if we only rely on the data from the 2017 survey, assuming all else constant, we would choose North America only for the high salary, since salary growth and career satisfaction are behaving similarly. But since in the real world all else is not constant, we would have to compare if the high salary makes it up for the rest of the important this that are not considered in the study data, social policies, quality of life, etc.

all the code for the study is in the following https://github.com/venuv123/Blog-new.

Thank you