281–290 of 353 posts
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Then you have SOs, kids.. do they have the same standards, and is that guaranteed to stay?
Nothing in life is guaranteed. I have contingencies in place to withstand life events, but there is no place on Earth where you can guarantee your future.
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You don't run out of sick days, if you're sick you're sick. You just run out of paid sick days. The employer will just drop you.
Do you mean "drop you" as in stop paying for you while you're off sick? Or is it "drop you" as in simply show you (an emailed picture of) the door and terminate your employment? 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…
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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
I think you can do this math yourself pretty fast: US median software eng salary is about $170k/yr, German one is $80. 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 fo…
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...
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Ah, but then your first comment is highly misleading, because when you talk number, readers assume cost per year. 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 easi…
Really? I never thought that could possibly be interpreted as cost per year. I can clarify that. 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 ext…
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.
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Americans with higher incomes likely have very good vacation policies. I get 25 days per year.
What you call very good is almost the minimum (24) vacation days in germany plus you get public holidays ontop of which range from 10-12 (in a good year most of them are during the workweek). Here people who have good jobs can get ~35 vacation days.
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.
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Nothing in life is guaranteed. I have contingencies in place to withstand life events, but there is no place on Earth where you can guarantee your future.
it helps with everything when there are lots of safety nets in society…
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it helps with everything when there are lots of safety nets in society…
That’s just offloading the responsibility to the public / to the government.
It takes a village to raise a child.
I wonder how much of is about with what kind of ideologies you grow up with.
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Salaries are so much lower than our American counterparts you'll be working right up until our government mandated retirement age, which is increasing. Our economic growth across the EU is stagnant. These are not things to be celebrated.
>Salaries are so much lower than our American counterparts 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 wo…
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.
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Free as in I can get flown to the ER without having to worry to go bankrupt. 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
All US full time positions include health insurance, the insurance included with a good software job is, in my experience, miles and miles better than the one I now get in Scandinavia.
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?
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You don't need to do _wild_ savings to retire at an age where you can enjoy your health in the US, as a tech worker. 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 statistic…
Ah, yes; because the only people we should consider in these discussions are Silicon Valley tech workers, who consider making $150k a year to be "on the low side". 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?
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.