How do all these people immigrate to the US? Is it all family-based? I work in technological field with many more opportunities in the US and have researched how to move there but it seems almost impossible. I know an American who applied for jobs in my country, got an offer and was over within a few months but that doesn't work the other way round.
There are 3 dialects of Irish and a lot of names are pronounced quite differently depending on which dialect you are using. Sometimes one particular variant has caught on across the island and in other cases there are multiple variants in use. https://www.abair.ie/ga gives you an accurate pronunciation of any Irish word in all 3 dialects
Most big US HW/SW companies do have a significant presence in Europe and some other places like Israel, it's not like Europe has a lack of engineers and scientists capable of building this stuff, they are just mostly working for US companies
Yeah I've been working in digital ASIC design myself for the last few years since graduating college and the pay is pretty good but I'm trying to plan how to get out of the field because job opportunities are quite limited, you can't just switch companies every few years the way software engineers do, unless you live somewhere like Silicon Valley and I don't want to have to move across the country whenever I want a new job.
They're fairly competitive compared to the rest of the world. He is also working for a US company who could pay him more if they really wanted to. US salaries are high because the US has a glut of engineering jobs and is also a difficult place to immigrate to (generally requires you to have family ties or a job offer which is not easy to obtain when you might not be granted a work visa and won't realistically be able to start for about 6 months). If the US ever adopted a more lax immigration system in line with the UK, Canada, the EU etc I would expect US engineering salaries to drop.
I understand this but I think the biggest driver for software salaries is the sheer number of companies that are interested in hiring software engineers. Plenty of hardware companies are very profitable but do not raise their salaries because there is no market pressure to do so as the more limited job market means EEs/embedded engineers do not switch companies nearly as frequently and switching companies is generally the best way to get a substantial salary increase.
This is true, trying to switch from FPGA's/RTL Design to something higher up the stack over the next few months for this reason. My employer does seem to have great difficulty hiring anyone with these skillsets but funnily enough, the salaries never seem to improve.