Very cool. Salaries seem on the low-end of the industry standards from what I've seen. $120k for 5 years of experience in the Bay-Area is pretty insulting.
It makes no sense to hire a person in SF for much more (and he will not really benefit from it) just because you compete with multi billions dollar businesses that can cut costs somewhere else.
At some point people do not want to change the world with next Instagram. They just want to live nicely.
I think a lot of people paid that much are reaping the benefits of strategic and tactical decisions made over decades -- they just happen to be there when it's all paying off and things are going well.
Not sure what to make of this other than that if, as a developer, you want to be paid well, go to a company that's "winning" and has mountains of cash. Shocker, I know.
(Though, as someone who's worked at a few places early, it does irritate me more than a little that these people take so little risk and yet are so highly compensated, relative to the guys who were there at the beginning getting things set up from scratch. Being an early employee at a startup is really such a shit deal - you take most of the risk, get a fraction of the equity of a founder, work hard, and don't get paid nearly as much as the people who come in 10-20 years after the strong groundwork has been laid)
Seems like great advocacy for communism if I've ever seen one.
Not only there's vacation as other people mention, but most importantly and often ignored : tax rates and retirement.
In those 55k, you also probably have a bigger tax bill, so it would be more fair to compare money that ends up in your pocket.
Retirement: you probably have a national system, with a formula that tells: if you worked X years at salary Y, your retirement income will be Z. You might also have extra retirement plans if you want to save more. In the US, retirement pensions is not a thing (except maybe public servants etc?), So you're responsible of saving by yourself. The employer will sometime help (like for every dollar you put in your retirement plan, they'd match 50 cents, up to ~20k per year), and that money you put in the retirement plan is tax free, but the point is that it's money you theoritically should not access until retirement.
With those 2 factors, the money you actually get to use is different, and then the cost of life is different: raising kids in the US until college, would be a different price than a kid in the Netherlands until the end of university.
Dutch income tax more closely resembles the tax bracket in midwest America.
My income tax percent in Holland is slightly lower than it was in the U.S. and my pay is a bit higher than it was in the U.S.
On top of that you need to pay the federal income tax, as well as social security and Medicare tax!
And bear in mind in the UK this was British Telecom with civil service type holidays and perks - working there did remind me of the Laundry Files :-)
That's unusual.
I could cope with 50-60 hours a week. I could not cope with only one proper holiday a year.