As much as I like my vacations, I would rather prefer US salary over it.
Does the US salary hold up against the benefits you get in a well-off EU country? Namely free healthcare, automatic payments into pension fund, strong social system if you're ever in trouble, etc.? 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
- 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.