66% of Americans say they want extended European-style vacation policies at work

Is it a suprize to anybody that employees do not appreciate being exploited for financial gain?

WHAT? Does that count sick days as well, or is that a myth?

Here in Germany, I get 30 vacation days per calendar year, plus any sick days, and thats fairly normal.

Edit: Sure the absolute salaries here are lower, but the cost of living is vastly different and the social support structures and healthcare are different, too. That should definitely be kept in mind.

I dont need to drive my car a lot, because my city is fully walkable/bikeable, and thats not a super rare thing here. There are a lot of factors.

I feel vacation days are just a basic requirement for happiness, whereas being rich maybe isnt

It seems to me that, as high as US salaries are, they arent that much higher compared to European salaries when you factor all this in, plus the face that a month of that work youre paid for youre OOO

[0] Europe gets more vacations than the U.S. Here are some reasons why. https://www.npr.org/2023/08/17/1194467863/europe-vacation-ho...

The European laws are not some random thing we made up because we are lazy. It is to ensure workers are well rested and ready for a new working year. Hence in long term it will also benefit employers.

Some personal anecdata: I notice an immediate difference when I come back after a long vacation. The first 2-3 months I work at top efficiency, get probably done twice as much as I would do any other month.

Does this include public holidays? Or do you have public holidays?

I get 25 days per year.

Sure, I’d rather be super poor in Europe than in the US. But anybody above the poorest, anybody that can and wants to work for a living, I’d much rather try to find my luck in America.

The whole package is what matters.

We work to live, not live to work.

But in France you get something out of your taxes

I'll stick with the health care, education, paid vacation and sick leave, lower crime rates, lower incarceration rates, zero school shootings, etc.

Depending on the state there are ten to thirteen public holidays (but some invariably fall on the weekend).

Retail, service industry, and blue collar work is very different, though. Time off is not always guaranteed, and sick days are not always paid.

Most Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck and don't have much hope for their future. They feel like they're going to work until they drop without a plan or the resources to grow old with a shred of dignity.

I live in a big European city. You basically don't need a car - pretty much anything within the city is reachable in about 30min, and public transit is comfy.

Also, I have a public transit ticket that allows me to travel the entire country for a year, which only cost about 1000€.

Yes, salaries are lower, but I also don't have to save anything to get my kids through university, or keep emergency funds for health issues.

Also, I can't just get fired without cause. And if I do get laid off, I have 3 months of grace period, plus potentially years of unemployment money.

Also, the government even pays for certain courses so I can find employment again.

The social system in Europe is amazing.

What you refer to is basically lowest level safety net.

Also, vacation days are not always used for fancy instagram post holiday. As random as life is, there are non-medical emergencies that one needs to attend to occasionally. Being able to see family is another one. Not everyone has their parents located within 1 hour driving distance.

My personal preference is to work as contractor and charge only for the days when I work. It takes away the feeling that the employer (or client) has a full control of your life and can dictate whether you will take 4 or 5 days off within a year or try to guilt trip you into working over weekends for no proper reason.

For context UK can commonly have 20 to 30 working days and that won't count public holidays (which depend on the country, and should be around 9-11 days which includes new year's, xmas).

In the case of the UK, much of the working hours, weekends, time off for bank holidays etc were hard-won agreements and rights from the Industrial Revolution era to the 20th century. The UK led the charge with many of these things too

I wish more people understood this. We had basically slave labour, workhouses, horrific factories etc

Americans should also stop focusing on bullshit stats like "working two jobs or more". The percentage of Danish people who work two jobs or more is roughly the same as in the US. The real problem are the long working hours and lack of vacation in the US.

Why is that a problem? At macro scale you can't really save money. As long as the pension payouts are somewhat balanced to pay ins each year it is kinda fine.

>automatic payments into pension fund

This is trivial to do if you spend a few hours researching. It's your money they are putting in at the end of the day, but now it's inaccessible to you until you're old. God forbid if you are an exceptional case (e.g. moving outside the EU), since the systems are getting more rigid by the day to save on labor costs.

>as high as US salaries are, they arent that much higher compared to European salaries when you factor all this in

Depends entirely on your job. High-skilled workers are higher at the end of the day. It's almost entirely a cultural/mentality issue for high-skilled workers, who have the money to take months off but are trained to be workaholics. The same way most Europeans are trained to do this '1 month off 11 months on with Xmas and a few random days free' dance, without realizing they can take off more if they have the money for it.

It's primarily to the benefit of low-skilled workers, who are guaranteed a better minimum in most of the EU rather than being at the mercy of the 'free market' in the US. And even that is debatable and case-by-case.

Maybe is not as bad as you think?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...

You can get really lucky in the US and have a great experience, but you can also have really terrible ones _and_ pay quite a bit for it.

Strong social system as in you get 60% of your salary if you go unemployed for s year.

Im not sure you realize that lots of things you pay are for the chance something doesnt go as planned in your life. Ofc its better to live in the US from a financial standpoint if everything works out and you never get sick or unemployed etc

What's the minimum wage in the USA?

And, yes, if you're a full-time minimum wage employee in the UK you get a minimum of 28 days paid holiday.

edit: In Germany. I‘m German and I have studied there. I should know.

edit2: Someone said this comment could be interpreted as the cost per year which is not the case. This is the total cost.

Both will include full health benefits etc.

With 5 weeks paid vacation in DE and 2 weeks in US, that would be $170k for 50 weeks if work vs $80k for 47 weeks.

Not counting US taxes being lower and looking only at gross pay, that’s about $1.7K/week in DE vs $3.4K/week in the US.

So after correcting for vacation, US engineers make about twice German counterparts

And the difference gets even more stark if you have children.

In the EU, this type of job is much more rare, and even if you get one, after 5-8 years you'd probably be at around $400k-$500k.

Here people who have good jobs can get ~35 vacation days.

I get 30 paid vacation days, 10 ish public holidays and my employer has to pay up to 6 weeks of sick leave a year (after that the public health insurance pays).

I make around 75k€ with a 38 hour work week and my take home is roughly 3600€ net. My living expenses are less than 1k (mid sized city, no car, split rent, no kids) so I am able to invest 2-2.5x my living expenses every a month.

If you live with your parents, and the university is free, where does that number come from?

And if you don't live with your parents, you live with others students, spending 600-1000 euro month for living, how do you reach that numbers?

I'm probably among the top 5% here in Denmark and I'm fine with paying high taxes.

We have a similar issue in Germany when it comes to the time between calling in sick and when you need a doctors notice. A lot of companies want a sick note from the doctor from day one. Means if you feel just not great you have to haul your ass to a doctor. Others and my employer counts in wants a sicknote after or on the 3rd day. That is great as it gives you the ability to just rest etc. But that system could be misused. So if it is better to count in that some might misuse it but overall the health of the workforce stays in balance or to employ a strict system where workers are compelled to get into work until they feel really sick … I tend to preference the system with trust. But I can see that that might not work everywhere.

Sick days are fairly normal, but "30 vacation days" is not. Only bigCo/large places offer 30(some offered 35 days too). Usual is 25(state normal) with +1-2 days extra at most places. However, sick leave is godsend, no denying.

Do you have sources on that?

My anecdotal experience is that I need at least 3 weeks.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...

The big skewness (difference between the mean and the median) suggests that a lot of wealth is concentrated at the top and that many people are in fact worse off than Europeans.

Overall, I estimate that my university education cost my parents around 7000 EUR. And this wasn't even educational costs, but mostly living expenses.

https://www.rechtsindex.de/arbeitsrecht/490-jahresurlaub-mus...

Of course, the societal benefit of strong social systems though aren't really comparable to an individual's benefits in my opinion if we're just asking where someone will be better off. Individually, I'm not sure what it's worth to me either, although there is some level of private equivalents through disability insurance etc., though it's certainly not as comprehensive I imagine. I don't know how the pension works exactly, but my impression is that it's something like a 401K retirement plan in the US, where you put in some portion and your employer also matches some contribution amount.

So I'm not sure the different in benefits makes up for the 136k gap.

I am also there and I didn't pay any monies anywhere for university(unless you mean fancy private university?). All state universities are free and we only paid some misely amount every 6 months for the city-ticket(free access to all public transport in the city, cool stuff). Also, state pays each child ~125/month until they are 25.

I believe you are in some different parallel universe entirely O.o

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17335444

The question is loaded and I guess 21% can think it through (or their company already gives them better).

Also, even the senior key people are often not really expected to answers emails during vacation. It might be different at the director level and above, but they're pretty much all workaholics anyway, so they don't mind.

[0] https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten...

I know this to be true in Switzerland, and only in banking. Where it has to do with detecting fraud in your absence.

I'm too lazy to look up the details, but here in Spain the rules are something like no pay for the first 1–3 days of continued sick leave (if not a work accident, in which case you are paid from day 1), followed by a partial payment per day off (40% of base rate?) with gradual increase as the sick leave is prolonged (15 days maybe?) with the payment being gradually reimbursed to the employer by Social Security, I think up to 75% of the employee's base rate. Businesses may of course choose to top it up from their own purse.

Other than the business legitimately suspecting abuse of sick leave, the only special case breaks into effect when sick leave exceeds 365 continuous days, at which point long-term disability may be considered.

I cannot say how dystopic the idea of having limited sick days sounds to me. I am someone who very rarely gets sick, so I very rarely need to call in sick, but I simply know I am protected if I need to as a basic right. And some years ago I did have to make use of it unexpectedly (of course!).

Through no fault of my own I was involved in a traffic accident over a weekend which resulted in, among other minor injuries, a severe traumatic brain injury which could have killed me or left me disabled if it weren't for the emergency brain surgery I received. I spent a week in the ICU, another week in the main hospital wing, months of rehabilitation, and around 10 months of "sick leave" until I was able to work again. I was decently paid this whole period and at no point did I have to worry about losing my job (nor about "medical bills" of course!), being able to fully focus on myself and making a full recovery. I can only imagine how awful it could have been had I not had these basic protective rights as a worker and a citizen.

Nobody discusses costs like this.

The city I live in now has about four dozen restaurants within a mile of my home and is perfectly fine to walk in. Granted, there are more parking lots in that radius than I would prefer, but overall it is walkable. The city I lived in before that had fewer parking lots and a better street grid, making it more walkable still.

Not only that, they are a requirement to make a good worker, that consequently make a good company. If you burn out your employees you fall behind schedule pretty quickly, so you have to rely on high turnover, which isn't a great option either.

Take the example of Japan

With a new law taking effect in April 2019 requiring employees who are due 10 days or more of paid vacation to take at least five days off per year

Working too much can have tremendous social consequences

Japan has long had a reputation for being one of the most overworked countries in the world. The term karoshi, or death by overwork, emerged in the 1990s when an increasing number of Japanese professionals were dying from heart attacks and strokes. Recent years have seen an epidemic of suicide, in part because of work-related stress: of 30,000 suicides in 2011, 10,000 were believed to be related to overwork, according to the police.

Then you have to start adjusting the money in (higher taxes) and money out (reduced benefits), and different people in different ages/income/wealth levels start having different opinions.

A room costs minimum 350 Euros or may easily cost 1000.

Food and going out costs at least 100 Euros or healthy food 200-300.

The subway ticket at that time cost 70 per month.

There are some additional costs such as health insurance etc.

Tuition at that time was 500 per semester for me.

Spending a semester abroad as is common is usually far more expensive.

And by law your parents have to pay. You are not required to even work.

On average parents are required to finance housing and food with 930 per month.

Source: https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/geld-versicherunge...

plus another ~10-15 days of National holidays

35.000-45.000 for the Bachelor alone.

https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/geld-versicherunge... (Verbraucherzentrale, semi-public consumer protection agency)

10.000 per year:

https://m.faz.net/aktuell/finanzen/meine-finanzen/frag-den-m... (one of the top quality newspapers in Germany)

36.000 und 75.000 per child:

https://www.sparkasse.de/pk/ratgeber/bildung/studium/studien... (Sparkasse, pretty much the largest credit union)

Up to 133.000 (1851 per month):

https://www.studis-online.de/studienkosten/

But sure, believe what you want.

Needless to say, I didn't accept the job in the end.

> Tuition at that time was 500 per semester for me

This is the number people talk about when they're talking about tuition costs for Americans. Everyone needs shelter and to eat, whether they're a student or an engineer at a FAANG.

It's $5-10k fo r community college depending on in or out of state. It's $10-$20k per year for a university for most, and if you look at a "top" university, it's significantly more.

University of Boulder which is a top-50-USA-university is just shy of $40k per year for tuition. Stanford is $55k, and UPenn (Which was the most expensive I could find) is $61k per year.

Contract work is a fundamentally different proposition and equating it to employment is foolish.

Here in the UK, I get 29 days paid vacation plus ten or so (not sure) public holidays. If I am sick on vacation, I can claim those days as sick days and regain the vacation time. Edit: plus, my contract is for 35 hours per week whereas in the US it was 40.

Regarding money, I am doing the same job that I was doing in the US (same team etc.) but took, what was at the time, a 25% reduction in gross salary. However, by the time you add in the higher taxes, my take home pay (from my salary - my stock awards are the same) is about 40% lower than it was in the US.

Now, I am nearing 50, my corporate career progression is plateauing/settled (by choice, btw) and I have a teenage daughter. A big reason for coming back to Scotland was so she could be educated here and experience European life and culture during her formative years. The other big reason was to have a better work-life balance. I have so much non-work time here, I can actually pursue non-work interests; whereas my US work colleagues seem to always be Slacking and "checking in" while they are on vacation; never seeming to have an identity beyond their job.

I have also lost 13kg (29lb) in weight.

For us techies, the US is the place to get rich, but, in my experience, there are significant lifestyle compromises that you must make in order to do so.

Edit: I was curious about the numbers, so I did a little arithmetic to work out the hourly wage I earned in the US and the hourly wage I earn here in the UK, taking into consideration the vacation days.

My UK gross per hour wage is between 11% and 15% lower than my US salary, depending on the (volatile) exchange rate. Of course, UK tax is much higher (my marginal rate is 49%). So, the difference in take-home pay is more than that.

That may be true in theory. In practice, many parents are in an income range which makes the child not eligible for educational support (Bafög), but which also does not allow supporting the child with 1000 EUR/month. The thought of telling my parents "you are required by law to send me more money, do it!" never occurred to me. They had a house to pay off. Both my mother and father worked more hours per week then I did for university (around 4-5 hours per day, at most, and only during the semester - I did nothing for university for around 4 months during the semester vacations). When my father was the same age as I when I started university, he had already worked for 7 years and paid rent and food money to his parents. So I think paying at least the rent, tuition, and food myself was the least I could do.

https://www.wirtschaftsforum.de/tipps/welche-anzahl-an-krank...

The fact that some of the best US universities have outrageous tuition is neither new nor surprising nor does it invalidate my claim. I drew no comparison to the US, you are drawing that comparison.

Economic growth is stagnant because energy production and energy import are stagnant. This has little to do with policy. It's 2011 all over again, when we heard all sort of 'southern Europeans are lazy/corrupt' and other shit. I even bought it like a good child. No. Southern Europeans economies used to depend a lot on north sea and Sahara oil and gas, and the reserves (and production) started declining in 2008 and 2010 respectively. Only oil producers, Russian clients and 'nuclear-based' economies managed to avoid crisis.

What is funny now that everybody speak about how Germany economy is in crisis. Well yeah. Same causes, same consequences.

I really don't see how it seems no one gets it. I understand politics wanting to grandstand and explain how growth is caused their policies, but I mean, the data is available. And we have panda. Look at oil import data from Italy then look at growth, from 2010 to 2012,its obvious one of the two is driving the other. Check the other 'PIGS', it's the same.

Burn out in Europe is still omnipresent and rising these days. This includes Germany, the 'chosen child' every proponent points at in these discussions. A few weeks off barely makes a dent in this and vacation days / time off hasn't been that noticeably different since the 70s/80s.

>Japan

That's just a law that pushes them to use it and keeps companies from going 'ah yeah difficult'. It's barely anything when work culture chains employees down to the whims of employers, or risking to be seen as dysfunctional for trying to get out of that 'I belong to my company' trap.

Surprise, that's the same culture that exists in most EU-countries. Just less hardcore.

Now what I wouldn't like to deal with is with lack of paid holidays, having to deal with masses of insurance paperwork and co-payments in case I need healthcare assistance, or deal with running out of sick days over the course of a year if I'm unlucky.

I suppose with enough wealth I wouldn't need to worry about the problems above, but I believe very few Americans have succeeded in that regard under their system. So, I prefer to stick to the generally European approach of protecting the basic rights and wellbeing of all our citizens, and will strike to defend it if necessary.

You are basically saying that living in Europe in a university city cost anything between 6000 and 20000 euros each year.

Maybe a bit high, but I think I can agree.

But living is a cost all around the world, and universities in Europe add a very low overhead on top of it, while universities in US can easily triple your cost of living, so I still don't see your point

In Norway you can have 10 kids and all they have to do is be diligent about doing their homework, and they will get into university.

In Germany students receive no grant (other than the regular Kindergeld for children) unless their parents together earn less than 40k before taxes.

- Salary caps in the USA are orders of magnitude higher than in EU. You can easily find senior engineers that make 400K a year in total compensation and principals/staff engineers 700K+. These numbers are unheard of in EU.

- Income tax rates range from lower (even in high-tax states like California) to vastly lower (Texas, Washington state). Even if you find that unheard of European job paying 400K euro a year, you'll be donating 50% of that income to the tax man. In the US, you could be looking at 25% for the same income.

- Employer-funded health insurance is generally good across the board and can be absolutely top notch.

- Private pension schemes like 401K are partly funded by employers with generous rates and are 100% owned by you. There can be no "means testing" or "reduction of benefits" by the state in the future.

- In addition to private pension schemes partly funded by employers, there's social security which can be seen as a public pension that's funded by federal taxes. Current social security payouts given typical tech salaries exceed every European public pension scheme I'm aware of. Even if social security completely disappears in the coming decades, a good engineer in the US will be a multi-millionaire by retirement time.

- Early retirement in one's 40s or early 50s should be an option for a significant percentage of USA software engineers. This is unheard of in EU where one's expected to work until one reaches retirement age.

So there's really nothing that a well-off EU country can compete in vs USA, benefits-wise.

My point is that the statement that salaries can be low because university has no cost is wrong. The cost is significant even without tuition and therefore salaries absolutely matter.

And without even a shred of doubt, a US tech salary of supposedly around 150k compared to perhaps 80k in Germany more than balances the extra costs for university over a time of 20 years that the kids grow up.

If that was true Europe would have the highest productivity of the world, but it doesn't.

If they don’t know, that’s a red flag. Id expect it to be about 20-25 if it also includes sick leave. 30-40 means people really take the policy seriously.

But you are missing the biggest point! Not everyone is working in IT. And a ton of people do not make $200k+/year.

We're in a group that is very well paid. But most are not. And for them European vacation policies or a social system that doesn't ruin you when you are ill are a big difference.

Everone working it IT is speaking from within an ivory tower.

> you'll be working right up until our government mandated retirement age

As will an american, unless they're going to go without healthcare? Unless you're doing some _wild_ saving, paying for health insurance as you age is going to necessitate working. Health insurance for a couple (assuming you can get it and it covers anything that you might have wrong) is about the same cost as my mortage here in the UK.

It's also not a government mandated retirement age, it's the age that the government will provide financial support to you. It's feasible for someone on a median income in the UK (where I live) to retire before they hit 66, as long as they prepare. Someone making a median income in the US is unlikely to be able to.

> which is increasing

Again, technically true but also misleading. It's not just steadily increasing, there's only so far it can go. The equivalent age in the US is already 70, fwiw.

> Our economic growth across the EU is stagnant

The horror. Personally, I'll take stagnant economic growth over statistics that get pumped by tech firms that are richer than entire countries in europe - Microsoft and Apple are individually worth more than Italy.

> These are not things to be celebrated.

US cost of living is skyrocketing (they're behind us at the moment, but their COL was already higher so the comparison is tough). Inequality levels in the US are still wildly higher than anywhere in europe (even the UK), the US has massive social problems that don't exist on the same scale here, etc.

These are not things to be celebrated either.

I studied at university and my parents paid nothing. Even as an adult student could I go back and get the grant part. In Sweden the state pays for you to study.

[1] https://www.csn.se/languages/english/student-grants-and-loan...

The point of vacation days is that they are fully paid by the employer. Unpaid time off usually isn't a problem (depends on the type of work of course), as long as the employer can plan around it (e.g. I currently work 4 days a week at 20% pay cut at a German company).

But then again, you don't blow half your salary in health care, don't risk having to claim for bankruptcy every time you get in an ambulance, you have access to the highest quality of education for basically free, and many others. You are also in an incredibly privileged job. In the real world, the US has a higher poverty rate than Germany does.

>you'll be working right up until our government mandated retirement age

So will most americans. And many of them will keep working past that age, because their pensions does not afford them basic living conditions. Just because you work in an extremely privileged sector where some of us can retire at 40 and do cocaine all day long doesn't mean the rest of the world can. Have some empathy.

>Our economic growth across the EU is stagnant.

growth growth growth must growth growth good growth necessary. This is the behaviour of cancer, not of an organised society.

>These are not things to be celebrated.

If you are unable to see anywhere past 5 meters in front of you and half an hour in time, indeed. For anyone with an inkling of reason an empathy, Germany is, objectively, a better place to live in in average than the US. And this is coming from a neighbour that can find plenty of reasons to shit on Germany.

The US government requires that women who have been at their job for more than one year get 12 weeks of unpaid time off. But many people can't afford to not be paid, so they don't take the full amount.

Women who have been at their job for less than one year legally get 0 days off.

Less than 25% of US women have any type of paid maternity leave.

You mean the ones that are getting ignored and violently repressed with police behavior that Iran considers overly violent ? Don't worry, we're getting to the American approach of a job market: work, or die.

> little ability to build wealth.

France is the third country in the world with the most millionaires.

Maybe productivity should not be the metric we should strive for?

I lived/worked in the US and Europe and my quality of life and overall happiness was way higher in Europe even if my salary was higher in the US.

Contract work is for when you can take the risks. You also need to have a good network and be able to sell yourself so you have a steady stream of work. Finding new work takes considerable time which you should factor in.

I personally love the freedom right now, but I’m using this as an in-between period until I discover what I really want to focus on.

Depends on how you measure productivity. Per hours worked, the top 10 most productive countries is almost only European. Per capita the results are different.

If I was let go I would retain health coverage through COBRA.

Let’s be clear: The US health system is a shit show, it’s just not - mostly - one that impacts high salaried employees (if it did it would have changed long ago..)

Uh, no, France follows the European-wide bachelor's master's doctorate system when it comes to granting european credits. Which means that, yes, you can follow the normal cycle of 3 years (license/bachelor's), 5 years (masters), 7 years (doctorage), and these will basically count if you're looking to study abroad.

Some of my coworkers have 2 years of studies (IUT/BTS). Some have 4 (M1). Some of the PhDs in my company have 9 years, other 11, others are both working and researching at the same time. There's no mandatory 3 years.

In the US if things go as planned, you have a house, two cars, health insurance, and you can pay for college for your kids. If they don't go well you can be in real trouble depending on what exactly went wrong.

In Europe if they don't go as planned, you still have access to housing and healthcare, and your kids can still get a degree. If things go as planned, you are paying for the people who weren't so lucky.

In the US, most highly-skilled senior engineers will be multi-millionaires in their 40s which means that they can immediately retire and pay out of pocket for private health insurance covering the entire family without even making a dent on their principal. Even if that wasn't an option, one can get health insurance via one's spouse or work a few hours part-time for an employer that provides it.

I retired in my 40s and spent the last 10 years living in both the US and multiple European countries (with a lot of time spent in Germany as I have family there). While I've so far enjoyed living in Europe, the worsening downward slope in quality of life is more obvious here than in the US. Unrestrained immigration is a big problem that's going to get a lot worse in the next decades and is already rapidly eroding the much praised European social safety nets.

Ultimately, US offers optionality which means that one isn't chained like a slave to a grossly inefficient disintegrating socialist state for the rest of one's life.

Have you ever been personally affected by something as abstract as "low GDP growth"? Or public strikes except maybe a bit of inconvenience? And what do you need "wealth" for except to reduce financial risks that are much lower in a civilized country to begin with?

Benefits aren't nebulous, they're concrete things. My employer offers a pension(401k) contribution, health insurance (which is a queue skip really here), income protection for long term sickness or death in service, and a "perks card" which is 95% crap but gives me a 25% discount on the largest gym chain in my area. That's just monetary.

On the "non-monetary" side, I'm guaranteed 33 days _paid_ time off (and promised 40 this year), have an option to take a month _unpaid_ with notice, I have employment rights and can't just find myself without a job with no notice or dismissed for no reason. There's also the "overhead"/admin work of managing a business and handling the tax affairs. Sure it's straightforward, until HMRC decide it's audit time.

> Contract work is a fundamentally different proposition and equating it to employment is foolish.

That, I agree with.

Before that, 70 euros? Where were you living, Freising?

Two external rings were around 50 euros at the time, and many students rent inside the (old) 4 inner rings, or the first external one if you study in Garching

What about the less capable though? Do we just forget they exist?

Real actual engineers who build roads and power grids make way less money and have way less benefits while IMO doing much more important work than 90% of software engineers even understand.

Please take into account the real world before commenting on how good things are for everyone?

Munich is the most expensive Germany city, just saying...

Germany may be good to live and get by but not great to actually grow, financially. The whole system is still designed so that you depend on your 800€ gov check in your senior years.

Unless your parents already built some wealth it is barely possible to do so in your own lifetime in Germany.

I don't think this conversation is worth continuing if you consider the US a bastion of freedom and the entirety of europe being entrapped to socialism.

From what I know, I work for a very large insurance company, it's mostly healthcare department due to consequences of COVID. Which shouldn't have happened, but it id.

> This include Germany, the 'chosen child' every proponent points at in these discussions

I'm not German and I do not particularly trust Germany, in fact I think it's one of the worst Western European country to live and work.

> A few weeks off barely makes a dent

But it makes a difference, that's the point.

I was simply pointing out that paid vacation it's a tool that's very useful for companies too, as for the 70s and th 80s, I was there, it was much worse than today.

My parents worked for the national healthcare in my Country, in 12 hours shift, 5 consecutive nights. Now it's 8 hour shifts for a maximum of two consecutive nights and then you get mandatory 36 hours off and morning shifts for a week.

Try working 6 days a week for a month and then 5 days a week for a month and see how much those "only few days" make a dent in your well being.

> Surprise, that's the same culture that exists in most EU-countries. Just less hardcore.

I work 220 days/year and I'm off 145 days, it's pretty standard here if you have a standard contract, so no freelance, no contractor, no off the books, etc. (230 work days might be closer to the average, I got +10 days of holidays for thermal treatment, to cure my chronic sinusitis, yes, we have that too and the State also pays for the treatments)

Which is not exactly a "few weeks".

Could be better, but could be US style or Japan style.

p.s. the law in japan just forces employers out of work at least for a few days to counter their extreme workaholic culture, which is nothing like what we have here in Europe.

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...)

Minimum mandatory paid vacation days, normalized for a five-day workweek:

Japan: 6–10 days

My Country: 23–28 days

At least that allows me to generate wealth and retire 20-30 years sooner compared to your average German.

I don't think workers' rights movements and government policies that promote said rights are really centered around uplifting highly-skilled senior engineers. Certainly if you have in-demand talent, migrate to whatever country pays the most for it. You have that luxury

Which causes companies to be very slow in hiring people, because if business turns they have less flexibility. European countries have some of the highest (youth) unemployment rates in the OECD:

* https://data.oecd.org/unemp/youth-unemployment-rate.htm

* https://www.oecd.org/employment/unemployment-rates-oecd-upda...

You just run out of paid sick days. The employer will just drop you.

Also congrats on the $350,000 salary as a dev at the age of 30. There's no one in Europe making that as dev, not even in the Netherlands or Switzerland, not even close!

Cost of living is skyrocketing where in the US and to what degree higher than its EU equivalent? The EU has borne the brunt of inflation so I'm having a hard time seeing where EU citizens are paying less to live than Americans.

> The horror. Personally, I'll take stagnant economic growth over statistics that get pumped by tech firms that are richer than entire countries in europe - Microsoft and Apple are individually worth more than Italy.

Ok. Economic growth is not a vanity metric for pumped up tech firms to move the needle on. Economic growth has direct effects on comparative quality of life. Trying to make some other, vaguely conspiratorial, equivalence is ignorant at the least.

> There's no one in Europe making that as dev, not even in the Netherlands or Switzerland, not even close!

Exactly! Which is ridiculous! And people always bring up "free healthcare!" as a counter but it doesn't really offset this vast discrepancy for someone with a generally healthy lifestyle. How are people in Europe wage-slaving like that all their life?

Edit: Lest it is misunderstood, this is not to demean the people. Rather, it is meant to critique the system. Free healthcare shouldn't mean having to give up indefinitely more in other regards. Furthermore, I'm sure European corporations too make millions and billions of €€ every year, so why can't they afford to pay competitively? Lastly taxes are obviously way too high and the pension rates are ridiculous for working 40-50 yrs. In short I'm critiquing the whole system.

Just imagine, you have the same skill, same daily struggles, same effort, same trouble waking up in the morning... but you make in a day what your mirror in another place makes in an hour.

I pay 33% in taxes on that income. But that 33% includes healthcare, retirement, school, university, etc... I'm currently enjoying 20 weeks paid time off this year to spend with my newborn. Also I only work 4 days a week, on top of the 5 weeks holiday every year.

I'm sure some devs in the US could also set this up for themselves and still come out on top, but in the Netherlands everyone gets this (not the 80k, but the society benefits). Which is worth something, too.

What is there to do except 'wage-slave' like this? We're just born here and make the best of it. :)

Plus you have to take into account that the difference is much smaller when accounting for PPP. Still you won't hear me complain to get all this AND a US salary, perhaps something remote in the future.

Strong social system just means that whatever happens to you, you can live in a home and eat food, as long as you try to get government benefits of some kind. Or for example, as a student, your costs of living are covered by Bafög, which is a kind of loan you pack back 50% of.

But as a worker, do I care where companies have their headquarters? All major tech companies have offices in Europe anyway

Alright, very small proportion of the population

>senior engineers

even smaller

>highly-skilled senior engineers

I cannot even begin to tell you how small of a proportion it is. By the way, you forgot a factor:

>highly-skilled senior engineers that happen to live in the right area (read: SF or NYC) and that are in the right domain

cool cool cool, so a few thousand people per generation can retire comfortably at 40. I'm sure the other 300 million of americans are happy to hear about that. Anything as long as you got yours, right ?

$82k is $4.1k take home (with healthcare) as a single in Germany.

$168k is $8.8k take home as a single in Portland.

Let's say monthly expenses are $1.5k as a single in Leipzig. According to numbeo I would need $2.5k for the same standard in Portland.

So in Portland I can save $6.3k or 2.5x my expenses and in Leipzig I can save $2.6k or 1.6x my expenses.

Healthcare is included in the net pay for Leipzig, but not Portland. Employer 401k contributions and other benefits are also not considered.

Other things to consider are safety, unemployment, workers rights, tenant rights, quality of healthcare, cost of elderly care, government retirement plans, PTO, sick leave, maternity and paternity leave, cost of childcare, etc.

Really comes down to what's important to you IMO.

And in trade for not getting another 10 days I get 2-3x the compensation as the EU.

That’s a trade I’m happy with.

To me there is just a difference between comfortable and great.

> What is there to do except 'wage-slave' like this? We're just born here and make the best of it. :)

To put it concisely: Becoming independent and doing what you truely want to do without having to worry about opportunity cost, monetary compensation, or societal repercussions for "wrongthink".

What devs are getting hired for $162k/year without a decent group plan with only a fairly token employee contribution?

Invest that on the side and you'll have built a fortune within a decade and a half, while your German friend has nothing significant in savings and is still living hand to mouth.

And we haven't even mentioned the differences in career steepness: After a few years it's not 80k vs 160k anymore, but more like 90-100k vs 200k+.

Also if you compare the best places in each country than you are looking at something like 100k vs 300-400k.

Again, I have been trying really hard to see if all the benefits you mention really offset this monetary discrepancy, but it's just too huge.

I make much more than my European peers, have a better car, better weather and bigger house. I have 25 days of paid vacation. While this is better than the US average, I don't know a single person in my friends group wanting to trade the US for Europe, including my Europe-born friends.

The fact that you work with WITCH companies says more about your situation than anything else, TBH.

Where is that, that you get 145 days of vacation?

The fact that you have expressed prejudice against people in WITCH companies says more about your situation than anything else, TBH.

None of the alleged benefits in Germany offset or justify the discrepancies to similarly developed countries.

I used SE salaries because this is HN. What does a ”real world” worker actually make?

If you look up the national median salaries you will find the median US worker makes more than the median German household, or more than twice the individual German worker for the same job.

So the exact same math I just did applies on the national statistics as well. Maybe it’s worth thinking about why it feels so important that this isn’t true, that northern EU workers surely must be much better off than their suffering US counterparts. The truth is much more complex than that.

You just give them their notice period whenever you feel like it and you're done with them, no need to PIP them or look for reasons to let them go.

This is not entirely true. They are more considerate in hiring which means layoffs, including mass layoffs, happen more rarely as they have consequences.

But they can fire people (and they do) when things go bad. This is one of most common reasons for firing people. What they cannot do is to fire me today and tomorrow hire someone else to exactly the same things that I was doing unless I was doing something wrong and they justify it.

Also if I go to the hospital and get a surgery or something I don't have a deductible or percentage I have to pay out of pocket.

My understanding of US insurance is that these are almost always a reality plus potentially a monthly premium.

It includes weekends (52 of them), sick leave (paid), thermal treatments (paid), national holidays (paid, unless on a non-working day) and vacation (24 days, paid)

I also get 8 hours of paid permits per month, but I can take at max 4 consecutive hours per day. They are valid for a year, if I haven't used them after that, they get paid and the counter resets.

all of that in Italy.

My current company gives me 20 days (combined vacation and sick) but we only get 6 paid holidays.

If we compare the median numbers for Portland and Munich, cities that actually have enough entries to have percentiles on levels.fyi, then the median compensations are $164k vs. $84k. That's $8.7k vs. $4.2k take home. Looking at Numbeo, the equivalent of $2.5k in Portland would be $2.1k in Munich, so that's $6.2k savings in Portland vs. $2.1k in Munich.

To me, that seems pretty significant.

There are two other aspects that can widen the gap. First, at the higher percentiles, the compensation in the US grows much higher than in Germany. Second, US engineers have the option of getting a significant increase in compensation by moving to the Bay Area, Seattle, or NYC, whereas in the EU you can't really go much higher than in Munich.

So after correcting for vacation, US engineers make about twice German counterparts

"Both will include full health benefits etc."

What I'm saying is that for a lot of people In America this isn't the case and it's those people who would benefit from more time off, especially because there job consists of more than sitting on HN for 50% of the day...

https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employment/employment-...

I can't think of an area of the economy anywhere that is more policy based than energy.

The goal was to compare MCOL cities. Maybe Leipzig wasn't the right one for that, but Munich is one of the most expensive cities in Germany.

Munich vs SF, Seattle or NY might be a fairer comparison.

Switzerland generally has higher pay than Munich.

Also how hard is it to get a $168k dev job in Portland vs $84k in Munich? I think $84k in Munich is significantly easier.

The 4k extra take home is more significant if you move to a LCOL place once you have acquired your fortune, not if you stay in the States. I would argue things like FIRE or Lean-FIRE are only slightly easier to achieve in the US than in Germany because of the comparably HCOL.

Both sound bad to me, but I can to a certain extent understand the logic behind the first option in terms of the financial interests of the company. I can definitely see a "Sorry Ashley, you're out of paid sick days so we won't be paying your salary this month, we can't afford paying for nothing. I hope you recover and can come back to work with us soon!". The way we make up for this in Spain (and I'm assuming in varying similar ways in other countries) is by having the Social Security start taking charge of growing percentages of the employee's salary during sick leave as it prolongs in time, so as to reduce the impact on the business.

The second "drop you" sounds much worse though. You have an illness or an accident bad enough that it exhausts your paid sick days, so your employer simply sacks you out of impatience? And what happens to the employment-dependent health insurance which (I assume) was what was covering you on your long sick leave? "Sorry Ashley, you're out of paid sick days so we're firing you. I hope you recover enough from your severe TBE before your savings run out so you can find a new job. Also I hope you weren't depending too much on our health insurance plan for rehab. Good luck!".

I forgot about Switzerland. Arguably it's not EU, but it's still a place that EU citizens can easily go to.

Given that both Portland and Munich have 1000+ entries on levels.fyi and the given numbers are the calculated median, I'd say it's a fair assumption that getting the median comp in both locales would be equally hard.

Do you ever give a thought to the vast majority of Americans who make less than you? Or even to the vast majority of tech workers who make less than you?

I guess this is what it really boils down to. Here in Europe we don't have to establish college funds, go bankrupt because of a heart disease, become homeless due to being out of work or get our kids shot in a primary school. We prefer to take a less materialistic approach to life and priorities at the cost of not being so fixated on "wealth".

Americans are just built differently

And that's selecting for a particularly senior role. Most people are what that site calls "computer programmers", whose median is $93k.

When this happens you lose your insurance too, usually at the end of the month. You can pay around $800-1200 a month to keep it though, more if there’s a spouse or kids

Even with reliable figures, you definitely cannot just "do the math yourself pretty fast". You are ignoring a whole bunch of things like cost of living differences, working hours, working environment, anything that comes on top of the "gross" like employer pension and insurance (not just health) contributions. For example, the average working hours in developed Europe is 10-20% lower than in the US[1].

Also, as others have mentioned, you can't really take one specific profession and extrapolate. The European labor market is definitely less free-market and by design slower to adapt to shifts. There is a cultural preference for more equitable pay even at the expense of the so-called meritocracy. Software developer salaries in the US have perhaps increased faster than other professions, and less so in Europe. Maybe that's unfair, but the inequality that results from allowing labor markets to move at market-speed causes its own problems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

Well, 30k-100k is about right for the annual cost of undergrad in the US and school costs are much more commonly discussed as per year than in total around here.

>My point is that the statement that salaries can be low because university has no cost is wrong. The cost is significant even without tuition and therefore salaries absolutely matter.

That seems a bit misleading as well. Almost all of that cost is unrelated to university attendance. People incur costs for food and rent regardless of whether they're university students.

Not to mention most in that environment have plenty of flexible work arrangements as well.

I also CAN take unpaid extra days and most years do, in essence doing that trade for a better price (~1k per day), but I recognize it’s not that common in the US.

It takes a village to raise a child.

I wonder how much of is about with what kind of ideologies you grow up with.

Comparing economic growth to cancer is extremely incorrect. Cancer grows unchecked causing pain and then death due to a failure of the body's regulatory system. Economic growth happens broadly because your population is growing and you are keeping up production per unit of labor and/or because you develop technology/business improvement that increases production per unit of labor. The latter causes abundance and better life for everyone (even when an outsized portion of the benefit is captured by the creator of the benefit) and the former keeps the standard of living possible for everyone and are very good things. If you want to talk cancer in economic terms that would be market power abuse, not growth. Market power abuse comes in the form of monopoly/oligopoly and the pricing power that situation allows and almost always slows growth (as the monopolist/oligopolist raises prices and decrease production to maximize profits).

In the context of a functioning regulatory system growth is extremely good. Right now governments fail at regulating by regulating both too much (try getting a new drug through the FDA for example) or too little (why hasn't microsoft, google, amazon, facebook, etc. all been broken up by antitrust regulation???). It is correct to lay blame on the regulator and incorrect to lay blame on growth.

Do you have the wits to determine a all times what hospital you can go to and still get it covered by insurance? Even with a broken femur and a concussion?

Wait until you find out about Prop 13 and how that new 80 year old $1.5m house you bought costs 10x in taxes what everyone else on the block pays because they got there in the 70s and 80s.

The EU system helps ensure you're not surrounded by people made entirely miserable by their wage slavery. Who would want to be surrounded by miserable fucks?

I live in the US state with the highest median income: Maryland. I feel lucky to have pursued a career here because I didn't grow up here and I didn't know much about Maryland beforehand.

I now feel as though I couldn't live elsewhere within the US. I was surrounded by exhausted, overworked, miserable people growing up in NJ and I see so much less misery here even though I interact with people from many different socioeconomic backgrounds; up and down the ladder.

It absolutely did:

> Tuition was 500 EUR per semester, so around 80 EUR/month.

Possibly it was edited in after you wrote your comment, but it's there clear as day.

The American obsession with making children pay their own way for everything is counterproductive at a social level and frankly revealing (and sickening) in terms of what it says about us as a people. God forbid someone (a literal child!) “gets something for nothing”.

This is really the core problem with America: a significant chunk of the population is literally mean and cruel and antisocial, in the sense that they oppose the idea of helping others as a concept in itself. People will search for reasons to justify their inherent belief that it should not be done. In fact in many cases they will actively promote cruel and counterproductive policies because it makes them feel better!

And as a result there's really not a single social system in america that is not rotted to the core even if it exists. Social Security is an insane mess to be on. Programs like food stamps are thrown to the states who underfund them in the best of cases, and in many times actually sabotage or deliberately shrink them, even when it results in receiving less money for the programs. That's the goal!

  Talent in Australia etc is just as awesome and doesn't burn itself out while being productive.  Having sane and "fair" working conditions goes a long way.

I mean they have disposable income measures that account for all that as well as welfare programs. In the end disposable incomes in the US make half of the first world look like third world:

https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm (click table, and pick gross including transfers)

You can also see % of that spent on housing, US is lower than most EU countries

it's the old "if we pay mcdonalds employees a living wage, the cost of your hamburger will double!" canard. no, it won't.

https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/safety/manual/section4-2.pd...

> Vacation Policies

> Banks should have a policy that requires all officers and employees to be absent from their duties for an uninterrupted period of not less than two consecutive weeks. Absence can be in the form of vacation, rotation of duties, or a combination of both activities. Such policies are highly effective in preventing embezzlements, which usually require a perpetrator’s ongoing presence to manipulate records, respond to inquiries, and otherwise prevent detection. The benefits of such policies are substantially, if not totally, eroded if the duties normally performed by an individual are not assumed by someone else.

> Where a bank’s policies do not conform to the two-week recommended absence, examiners should discuss the benefits of this control with senior management and the board of directors and encourage them to annually review and approve the bank’s actual policy and any exceptions. In cases where a two-week absent-from-duty policy is not in place, the institution should establish appropriate compensating controls that are strictly enforced. Any significant deficiencies in an institution's vacation policy or compensating controls should be discussed in the ROE and reflected in the Management component of the Uniform Financial Institutions Rating System (UFIRS). Note: Management should consider suspending or restricting an individual’s normal IT access rights during periods of prolonged absence, especially for employees with remote or high-level access rights. At a minimum, management should consider monitoring and reporting remote access during periods of prolonged absence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Kinda seems like you're just arguing that being very slow to hire has big advantages.

Of course I could have worked remotely for a similar pay cut and bought a bunch of rental properties in the Midwest or something, but instead we're living in a vibrant international city and have enough cash flow to pay our bills.

Ironic considering there's very few paths to FIRE in the US (work in tech, be born rich). Whereas the average person in the EU has a safety net that "independent" people in the US have to slave for.

Area more depending on policy: construction, food production, Healthcare, education, military.

I didn't realise they fell.

The thread you're commenting in is about whether workers can still do good things even if they get breaks, not whether they're currently a member state.

A cursory googling says that Swiss workers get 4 weeks and UK workers get 5.6.

Humans take care of each other. It's what makes us strong.

Few paths to FIRE in the US? Well definitely still more than in the EU.

The primary reason people aren't all going FIRE in the US is stupidity. Seriously, how can some people make 300k a year and not be a millionaire within a decade, then retire for the rest of their life in some LCOL place at 35??

You would have to force me to somehow blow that much money on retarded nonsense, as most of them seem to do.

For anyone who is not completely clueless about money FIRE is relatively attainable in the US.

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/summary-latest-fe...

In New Zealand, about 12% of individuals pay about 50% of personal income tax, and the top 3% pay about a quarter. That doesn't take into account the amount they are taxed indirectly through GST or through company tax on companies they own shares in.

Can you clarify?