As much as I like my vacations, I would rather prefer US salary over it.
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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
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.
What you refer to is basically lowest level safety net.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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..)
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?
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.
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.
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...
And that's selecting for a particularly senior role. Most people are what that site calls "computer programmers", whose median is $93k.
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...
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?