121–130 of 225 posts
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The cost of life argument makes no sense. By this logic we should be seeing janitors, or translators, or piano teachers in SV being paid much, much more then they are. If there was a coal mine near San Francisco I suppose the miners would be paid 100k/year as well?
If being a dev is the new coal mining. Yes.
A part of the gap can be explained by the way that work is organized in the US compared to Europe. Let's compare e.g. Germany and the USA: https://data.oecd.org/germany.htm https://data.oecd.org/united-states.htm If you scroll down to the Economic indicators, you will see that on average people in the US work around 1.700 hours a year, whereas people in Germany (and many other European countries) work only 1.400 hour…
Five things: 1. We are taxed on income heavily in the US. 2. Insurance is expensive here. 3. In the hubs, rent is very expensive. Take-home pay after considering these three things is a lot less than you might think. And also: 4. Generalizing the salary of positions across the whole US is misleading. An average engineering job in the midwest or outside of a hub can pay half the salary of SF or NYC. 5. It really depen…
Yes. I work remotely for a US company, and live in Hungary. I'm British. It's a great arrangement. Hungary is a modern country but much less expensive than the U.K.
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The statement was "There are no killings in cities", which is clearly not true - there ARE killings in cities. There are probably less overall than in America, but I really don't care enough to check.
"Probably"! The gun death rate is just over 10x higher in the US per capita (10/100000) v (1/100000), it's a massive difference.
If you can be bothered to go back and re-read my last comment, you'll notice I never once mentioned guns or even expressed a passing interest in comparing gun death rates.
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>[USA] has the highest GDP per capita in the world Not quite, it has the 18th highest. Below Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Ireland all who pay less for engineering. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
A more appropriate comparison might be GDP per OECD region, where the United States absolutely dominates. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_regions_by_GDP_...
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In Germany you also have to account that your employer by law has to pay into your non employment and retirement funds. This is about 21% of gross income on top. If you make 100k, your employer pays out 121k. They also have to pay half of your health insurance (also not counted in gross income numbers).
Employers in the US do the same thing. On top of your salary they pay ~7% for your retirement (social security, the public retirement), then taxes for your unemployment and a bunch of state taxes, and if you work in tech they pay for your health insurance (the one at my previous employer was $600/month). Usually they will also match money you'll put into your private retirement account. That's usually another $7-9k i…
You're not encouraged to rely on public unemployment insurance - the standard financial planning advice is to save and maintain 6 months of expenses in a liquid account.
If the public retirement and unemployment systems in other countries are actually sufficient, so you don't need to fund a private cover for them, that's easily 20% more ready cash.
I'm in the US and a friend just moved to The Netherlands to accept a much lower paying job. He swears he has more disposable income due to cheaper health care, Internet, transportation (no car required!), etc. The basic assertion being that the cost of living is higher in the US. I would love to see salary vs cost-of-living comparisons globally. I suspect this might account for the disparity, but I'm afraid I don't h…
TBH, when making $250k+ as many engineers in top bay area companies are, "standard of living" costs don't really affect you that much anymore... They don't take into account the luxuries of the exorbitant lifestyle you can afford. And there aren't really any other cities in the world you could move to where you can still just be a programmer and afford the same lifestyle (and still have a lot of money saved up every…
The rest of the standard-of-living costs (food, toiletries, etc.) would be vanishingly small, but housing would still be a big deal.
Hear the cuckold. Do you like to be dominated and have your wife/gf fucked by refugees? Oh wait.. you are German. So that must be why.
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The US does have the highest GDP for any major country, though. The ones above it there are all quite small.
Switzerland, Singapore, Norway, Hong Kong and UAE don't match my definition of "quite small". Each of them has several million inhabitants.
In any case it's a stretch to make an apples to apples comparison when you have 2 magnitudes of population difference.