Well, are you ready to live on a low middle class salary of a European software engineer? It is really low middle class. The middle middle here would be a bank clerk, and upper middle — a lawyer or a surgeon.
This is not coincidental.
Incidentally (also not) surgeons and lawyers are not poor in the states either… it’s just Silicon Valley was the perfect place with just the right people and it kept growing for 60 years straight. Surgery and law do not grow exponentially. (I’ll pretend the pages of regulation aren’t supposed to count.)