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
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
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?
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...