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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

If you end up choosing the US, and go to an at will state, keep in mind that your employer can fire you for wearing the wrong color of socks, even if they never told you which color is the right one (no, really). I think it boils down to whether you want to take care of yourself, or if you let the state do it for you. I would definitely take the 60K if it includes awesome public transport, unemployment money, affordable healthcare, a month of holidays, and having free time in the evenings for hobbies.

Your priorities, of course, may be different.

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> If you end up choosing the US, and go to an at will state, keep in mind that your employer can fire you for wearing the wrong color of socks, even if they never told you which color is the right one (no, really)

I live in a country where you have to pay insurmountable amounts of money to fire employees. The salaries that us pays are about 8x. Gimme at will employment.

> I would definitely take the 60K if it includes awesome public transport, unemployment money, affordable healthcare, a month of holidays, and having free time in the evenings for hobbies.

I had plenty of free time in SF to do whatever i wanted when I worked there. Maybe i was lucky, but i did not find work-life balance to be particularly out of whack. Europe is more relaxed, but also less ambitious in terms of culture. That can be frustrating as well.

> I would definitely take the 60K if it includes awesome public transport, unemployment money, affordable healthcare, a month of holidays, and having free time in the evenings for hobbies.

You are paying for all those things, its not like they are free in europe. You can also pay for them in the US on software engineer salaries. Google has ample pto, facebook has parental rights, etc. You can always take unpaid time off, something easier to do in the US than in other countries.

> your employer can fire you for wearing the wrong color of socks

Adding restrictions on employer's ability to fire makes employers far less likely to hire. It enriches the already employed at the expense of the unemployed. If anything it makes more sense to have at-will employment in countries with strong social safety nets because unemployment is less disruptive there.

Getting new hires up to speed is expensive enough that they'd be pretty stupid to actually do this. Sure a few do, but it isn't common.

Also, a couple minutes with google turns up this: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=AVD_DUR . If it says what I think it says, getting a new job really is easier in the US (like it should be, because as any economist will tell you this is what has to happen when a bad hire is less of a disaster for the employer).

I think it boils down to whether you want to take care of yourself, or if you let the state do it for you.

In part, yes.

But also, there are two approaches to reducing downtime. You can increase MTBF (make things more reliable, make it harder to get fired); or you can reduce MTTR (make things easier to fix, make it easier to get hired somewhere new). Europe goes with the first approach, the US goes with the second (which I very much prefer, because it doesn't gum things up).

Separately, there's also making downtime less of a problem (failover systems, all the various other social safety net things). The US is generally known to kinda suck at this.

It's not all of Europe which has strict laws about firing people. For an example, the Danish concept of "Flexicurity"[0], where the state protects the worker against the financial trouble of getting fired, but not getting fired itself. Of course, this tend to lead to a rather high tax rate.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity

>Getting new hires up to speed is expensive enough that they'd be pretty stupid to actually do this. Sure a few do, but it isn't common.

I believe the point they were making is simply that they can. You're not protected (aside from the small handful of reason that actually are protected).

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