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Comment by l0b0 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe because most Europeans are happy with a good work/life balance, and don't constantly obsess about pipe dreams that come through for one in a million people? Obviously such obsessives exist, but I bet they are a lot less common than in countries with a, let's say, get big or go home attitude. Also, state funded safety nets means it's less urgent to have $lots saved up to survive the next crisis.

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> because most Europeans are happy with a good work/life balance

That is the common trope but the truth is there is no other option. There are whole countries which are destined to end up as tourist destinations.

You mean like Croatia? They've had 1000 years of servitude and have only begun their 1000 years long dream of being their own masters. They will have to learn how to do that and it will take them a long time, but they are already on the top in the weapons, pharmaceuticals and auto industries ("HS Produkt", "Belupo", "Pliva" and "Rimac") and might someday become a ship building power once again. They won't be just a tourist destination forever.

Greece

You can extend that to any place east of Berlin or south of Milan, with the potential exception of Rome.

Gluposti.

> obsess about pipe dreams that come through for one in a million people?

Speaking as someone from Europe...

I don't have any first hand experience, but when browsing HN or Reddit, developer salaries above $150k seem to be the norm [1], not the "one in a million people" exception. As you may know, such salaries are unheard in Europe. It seems to me that becoming financially independent in the US is a matter of years [2], not decades. Sometimes it really makes me depressed. Also you seem to overestimate the safety nets. Putting 3-4 months of US paychecks away in a savings account will put you ahead of any safety net in Europe.

[1] Yes, i know, cost of living in places like NYC or SF are not comparable to major European cities, but even when factoring higher costs of living, becoming a millionaire seems rather doable.

[2] If you don't spend your money lavishly.

> salaries are unheard in Europe

This income exists in the UK for contractors.

$150k/year is a day-rate of approximately £500/day if you take four weeks off per year. This is slightly higher than the median but reasonably achievable (more so in London).

https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/Contract-IT-Job-Market

Contracting on these rates requires a lot more experience than you think and a highly sought out specialization often FoTM.

Getting yearly fixed term contracts on £500 a day is also not easy even with the former.

You also lose your pension contribution which in the UK can be upto 25% of your salary (I’m on 24), ISA, insurance protection against dismissal with no cause and many other things that employers provide.

Contracting isn’t a solution it’s worse than at will employment and the OP is right outside of a few cases the salary in Europe is pitiful and the safety net does not cover anything really it only ensures that there is almost no social mobility upwards.

Europe despite having the world’s largest social redistribution event aka WW2 is still the mother of all old money and isn’t changing because outside those who in the US would become billionaires it’s nearly impossible to become financially independent in Europe as a salaried employee and even as a sole trader.

Same in Switzerland, for contractors (actually more than 150k/year)

Care to elaborate? What kind of gigs yield that kind of money and how is taxation for freelancers in Switzerland?

Can't tell much about contractors but e.g. Google pays you 10-15% more in Zurich than in Mountain View and you pay much less taxes (and you don't have capital gains here). It's more expensive to live here but you'll still have much more left because of the tax advantages here.

Mostly banking and finance gigs. UBS, Credit Suisse, Swiss Re, Zurich, etc. Not necessarily cutting edge tech jobs though. Also, Zug, near Zurich has turned into a hotspot for blockchain-related startups and fintech companies.

To be fair, those places have also become unreasonable with cutting costs. IT in the financial industry used to be lucrative but is now about the worst place imaginable, especially since the latest fad is laying off indiscriminately and off-shoring, until the next financial scandal hits.

Gigs where people have very specialized knowledge, like SAP consulting, or where they have 20-30 years of system engineering and IT architecting experience. Taxation is low compared to the rest of the world, but since Switzerland is closed off to immigration and currently working on clamping down on it even more with all their might, it's pointless to discuss freelancing there. Which means that freelancers who work there live there, and that in turn means that you get an entire tax bill and have to cash out large sums of money on taxes in one go.

Switzerland isn't closed off to immigration and working on clamping down with all their might, I wonder where you got that impression.

It's the opposite. It allows unlimited immigration from the EU. The people voted against that it's true, but the government ignored the referendum and implemented a local worker preference instead. But with unemployment very low anyway, it is easy to argue you could not find a Swiss person to do the work, so this is effectively the same as doing nothing.

There are plenty of elder Swiss who’d gladly work if they only had the opportunity but are ausgesteuert instead, so there can be no argument about not being able to find the natives to do the work. Finding someone malleable and willing to work for peanuts is the issue here, not a lack of qualified domestic work force.

The 7000 contingency limit clause for EU citizens has been triggered, and we know how the last referendum went. Foreigners are a burning topic. Try getting a B-permit from outside of Switzerland; it’s akin to winning the lottery. Whoever got in, got in. The way is shut, and the Swiss keep it.

Was there ever a time when B-permits were easy to get outside the country? I had to come in on an L and convert, most people I know also had that experience.

I agree that immigration is a hot topic. However I'm not sure what difference more referendums will make if the government feels free to ignore them. Perhaps they'll have a change of heart.

At least EU citizens should have no problem to immigrate at the moment.

Becoming a millionaire is harder, yes, but so is also crash down to poverty. Safety nets such as cheap/free education, free healthcare, public retirement funds, more protective labor laws and such make it easier for everybody to avoid falling and/or getting out of poverty when times are bad. Your example of putting 3-4 months of US paychecks only work if you get paid a lot already, but not if you're poor or have high expenses (kids through college, medical costs). The social agreement in Europe appears to be that it is more depressing to see people losing everything to "market forces", and that letting people become millionaires in years is not a priority at all.

How come people keep repeating that ... and yet ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCg9htpWf0A

For example. A few searches yields plenty of recent movies about large amounts of homeless. But more specifically, if you go to Amsterdam, Brussels or Paris by train you will have no trouble whatsoever finding lots of homeless people. Granted, Amsterdam has a few, Brussels a pretty sizeable lot and Paris has tens of thousands at least.

In each of those cities, by the way, homeless are persecuted by the local police, and nothing ever seems to make any difference. Knowing the inclination of Dutch people (protestant, or to put it more bluntly "it's their own fault, obviously"), I don't envy the Dutch ones.

And whilst the poor people in the Netherlands live in extremely shabby apartment blocks riddled with crime rather than trailer parks, other than that there is little difference : garbage everywhere. Many youth gangs that have no option but to turn to crime and prey on their own community. Immigrants being the large majority of those people.

Oh and if you talk to them you will immediately find out, especially in the Netherlands : if you actually use the social safety net, you have to submit to the government "running your life". That "help" the government provides seems to have more than a few people who abuse the power they have (to, for instance, take away child care, or any children, require you to undergo psychological internment or take away your unemployment insurance). There's no end of complaints about that, especially in the Netherlands (less, but certainly present in Brussels and less in Paris).

Brussels and paris have homeless tent cities (maybe Amsterdam has them too, I don't know. Not in the inner city it seems. Both brussels and Paris have them in the inner city.

So there seem to be plenty of ways to "fall through" the social safety net in Europe. And this is the situation in the richest, most prosperous parts of Europe. There can be little doubt that the situation in Romania, for example, is far worse.

I very much doubt 150k is what most Americans earn. But yeah be rich in America if you can, be poor in Europe if you can't. Although there is more in life than money, when you leave your Silicon Valley gated community you have to look at the rest of the country.

Nobody in Europe is truly poor like they are in America. Most places in the States, one is lucky if one earns $40 to $55 k per year, and that's barely enough to make ends meet (been there, done that, got the T-shirt), especially for young people starting out like I was decades prior. Had to watch every dollar on that kind of a salary with home and car mortgages (like most Americans). If I had $200 - $300 left at the end of the month after paying everything, I considered myself lucky and hoped no unforeseen expense incident would take place. And that's true for most people in IT in the States. My buddy who rubbed elbows with me sitting at lectures at the university and has the same exact degree as me is earning around $55 k after more than 25 years in the industry, and his salary is above average compared to what the rest of the people earn.

Go out of the city in the UK, France, Germany not to mention Eastern Europe and you’ll see the same poverty.

I don’t mean just the salary: in America the safety net is very poor, medical insurance is an issue, transportation and social services aren’t uniform like they are in Europe; everything is spotty at best.

The safety net in Europe isn’t that great either as far as poor people go, the best I can say is that it’s better for the middle / lower middle class but the poor are just as poor.

Social services in Europe aren’t uniform either they vary greatly between states and between cities and regions within states, food, housing and transportation is much more expensive, the availability of benefits is often overblown with the only caveat being universal health care which isn’t that different for people who cannot afford it in the US if we are all honest at this point and for the middle classes private medical insurance is still the way to go for most member states.

Whoever thinks that Europe is some socialist welfare dream state is quite wrong about it. Being poor in Europe is quite bad and I’m not sure it’s actually any better than being poor in the US.

And the lack of social mobility for the middle classes as well as the suppression of personal agency as far as financial independence goes might blow back and blow back hard.

Europe has a big problem with government income as more than 50% of it comes from taxes which means that any crisis and any issue with the tax base tends to ripple much harder over here and as far as retirement goes then it’s quite likely that most people like myself won’t be able to retire despite paying very high amounts into the retirement fund because the government keeps raising the retirement age and there is no guarantee of that our funds would even be available to us.

This is the reason why I’m currently looking for a way to completely privatize my entire retirement savings plan, I work hard I earn very well and I deposit 24% into retirement with zero guarantee of seeing anything beyond the bare minimum when I finally will be allowed to retire which at this point is probjected to be at 75-77.

So sorry fuck that I rather take more risk and be able to retire at say 50 than having to work my ass off until I can see my 80s around the corner with no guarantee of getting anything remotely close to what I put in because sharing is caring.

You can't compare a US salary with a EU salary 1:1. In the EU you get retirement money, you get health insurance, and all kind of other benefits. You need to calculate all these positive and negative and then compare. And that's a lot of work!

The problem with this is that neither retirement nor health insurance has a guaranteed quality level, if the government reaches a slump or decides to refocus on other things, you can't get a refund/reinvest.

If I look at my governmental retirement projections, although i have been working and paying into it since age 20 it's depressing how little inflation adjusted retirement money I'll receive, although I earn a good tech-salary for our region.

Same with healthcare, in my city, Frankfurt/Germany, it's very hard to find a cardiologist that accepts patients that are publicly insured and even then the wait times can be scary for this type of situation. Hospitals have started rejecting patients that want to circumvent this by going to the emergency room.

The biggest issue for me is one of age-restriction. I'm fairly certain that my possibilities to earn this much more elsewhere will shrink over time and then I won't have a comparable cushion my US counterpart could have built, although we do the same thing. That is the equation that keeps me up at night at the moment.

If your issue isn't an emergency then yes, you'll be thrown out of emergency rooms because frankly they have much more important issues to deal with than a stubbed toe or a persistent cold.

Or required cardiac surgery, unless you're actually dying. Even if you cannot make a meter on an ergometer.

Exactly. Everyone in the UK gets free healthcare, for example, which is worth a substantial amount of money.

Yes, obviously it is not a 1:1 comparison, but even with additional costs for getting private healthcare etc. you are better of by far in the US. Also, i'd prefer to pay into a 401k plan over some EU government pension plan any time.

Perhaps, for me it just means that the comparisons are inaccurate.

I'd like to see an in-depth comparison which includes things such as taxation. I often see rent being mentioned in these comparisons. Cost of living is just one minor aspect. QoL is yet another, and more subjective. If you knew what my healthcare costs are and what I get out of it (or well, in the past), I am pretty confident that a lot of Americans would prefer that, except for a rich happy few. It isn't as if private healthcare doesn't have any incentive, or is always high quality. Example [1]

And even cost of living is difficult to compare. If you go to a US shop, pretty much always the price doesn't include sales tax. If you go to a EU shop, if the product is targeted for consumers the default price has to include the sales tax. I find the former -like the imperial system- not practical at best, and deceiving at worst. The latter is just a matter of seeing it from the customer's PoV though yeah it might lead to lower sales on the long run it leads to more happy customers.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17753294

Contractors and tech workers can certainly cash in $150k / yr in Europe. Jobs like that don't hang on trees, but they do exist. Whether that means working remotely, contracting or getting a regular job. Sure median wages aren't 150k many places in Europe, but that's not the case in the US either, only in the bay area.

> Putting 3-4 months of US paychecks away in a savings account will put you ahead of any safety net in Europe.

My parents had 3 kids through 5 years of University (tuition + living expenses), this was all paid by the state. Back of envelope math values it at $450k, but in the US tuition fees are much higher.

>becoming financially independent in the US is a matter of years [2], not decades

(European here) I don't care about being financially dependent on the state, because the state is not my enemy. The state gave me healthcare, the state gave me a free education, the state takes care of stuff. I don't care about "freedom".

We've banned this account for trolling. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You may want to talk to some people in Greece...

This way of thinking is so obnoxiously stupid. Yes some states failed in providing for their citizens. Greece was never a perfect system, the government was always corrupt, overly bureaucratic and nepotistic. That doesn't mean having and devloping trust in your government is always a bad thing. Especially if you live in Germany or Scandinavia. Treating the government as your enemy when it is actively trying to help you and the rest of its citizens is just dumb. Somehow people who hate government trust industry moguls to have their interests in mind more than the government. What the fuck?

Good intentions of government programs do not mean good outcomes. Rent control is a classic example. Also i really wish we would stop calling out other opinions and ideas as "dumb" and "stupid".

Good intentions do result in success. Good policies result in success. If you give up and say "government" will never work, then no. Of course it will never work.

Pointing to failed scenarios and saying x failed therefore y will fail is "stupid". You must examine why x failed and make sure you don't include this element when trying to do y. It is an iterative process.

One thing is for sure. If government employees don't have good intentions, the government will be ineffective. Therefore trust in government and willingness to see government as a force for good, willingness to work in a system that does good for its citizens, is imperative to having a good system.

  Good intentions do result in success

Then all it needs is people believing it will work so it can work, like magic ! Or Universal Basic Income

  Therefore trust in government

How citizen trust in government and government employees having good intentions are related ?

I missed a "not" on the first quote there.

I believe they are related because it is harder for people to develop trust in government if the good intentions of government workers and the governmental system in general is not apparent.

Conversely it is difficult to have a large pool of well intentioned potential governmental employees if a large portion of citizens have been brought up to think that the government is evil. These citizens are much more likely to try to exploit government positions than to treat them with the responsibility for the people that they require.

>state funded safety nets

Ding ding ding: this is the answer: those safety nets are also a cage.

Disclaimer: have started many businesses around the world, including the US and Europe. Europeans don't proceed to the glory and glamor of US startups because they have to deal with government bureaucracy, and alas such bureaucracy is contagious. The moment you wade into the grant-getting territory, you become a grant-getter. Grant-getters are anathema to technology-creators and other forms of society-changers.

I honestly don't know why you got down-voted for this: I can confirm from first hand experience that everything you wrote is a fact. This place often makes no sense whatsoever in what is considered good or bad.

I didn't downvote, but the post is not very informative, at least for someone who doesn't already know what they're talking about, like you. It's not very clear what's the relationship being implied between bureaucracy and grants, which grants are those, or how do they differ between the US vs EU.

For reference, I've worked at a couple of EU startups, and we didn't get any grants. It's not like you just get money for incorporating.

I think their point about grant-getters is spot-on. Thousands of companies exist just to apply for EU grants, get them, come up with a half-assed prototype and then quit the project. Unless you have connections in government in which case sometimes you can have a second and third half-assed product.

Of course there are also many non-gov-funded startups. However 1) it is demoralizing to see them getting millions in handouts while you struggle to sell a product and 2) they keep many talented employees trapped in deadend-companies.

I'm probably being downvoted by folks whose survival depends on that sweet, sweet, government handout.

Its okay with me - the point has been made.

You're not really defining the safety nets. It isn't as if the USA has exactly none either. Example [1]

If you're referring to the safety net that you get government money after you get unemployed, that's to ensure that you don't become homeless or get lured into crime. It has reinforcement to get you back to work ASAP.

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/disability/

It also means you don't work as hard to succeed.

Or it means you don't get homeless the moment you don't succeed. Those who don't work aren't living in wealth; all they have is basic necessities. The system stimulates people to work. Which, incidentally, is easier when you're not homeless and when you can afford food and toilet paper (which I happen to know you cannot buy with food stamps).

Can you give a flavor of that extra government bureaucracy you had to deal in Europe vis-a-vis the US? And in which European countries was that?

Germany, and Austria. Getting a grant in Austria essentially guarantees that the hunger you need to survive in the tech world today will be quenched by that sweet, sweet, government handout.

You are seriously arguing that the threat of starving is how you want to motivate people to work for you? Sorry but I doubt European bureaucracy is what’s holding your companies back.

The threat of starving isn't holding anyone back, and I didn't say anything about the people working for me - however the decadence of having a safety net means fewer real risks are taken, and certainly less responsibility for the basics. It means the people who work for me don't have to work too hard to keep their jobs - after all, the government will take care of them if I have to fire them for under performance.

Which happens, quite a lot more in Europe than it ever did in the USA. Americans seem to like to keep their jobs - Europeans couldn't care less.

Europeans not caring about keeping their jobs, what? That's so far from reality...

Hardly. The safety net means they don't have to work so hard at keeping the job, because if they lose it: the government will take care of them. This has knock-on effects all over the organisation.. including productivity issues.

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