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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

> 60%? Forget that. Why should anyone give up their right to work for a little over half of their market value?

Well, you could take the American option where you're not allowed to work in that field, so you get 0% of your salary... (California excluded, if I understand correctly)

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The German dev gets paid 25% of the US dev salary though.

Time to turn this the other way around: compared to the rest of the world, american developers (can) get an insane salary.

+ pension + healthcare + mandatory 20 vacation days + max. 48h workweeks + mandatory 30 days notice period + better social security net

and i dont need a gofundme page in case someone in my family gets cancer ...

You forgot +$400,000 per kid for university education - not to mention public school quality.

Only the most expensive private universities would cost that much.

Ain't that 24 days, 2 days per month) plus public holidays? just wondering. Confirming the rest.

24 days if you work 6 days/week + holidays

20 days if you work 5 days/week + holidays

16 days if you work 4 days/week + holidays

Ah, thanks for the clarification. thank god most employers go above the bare legal minimum, I never had anything less than 28 days. Once I even had the luck of being under a "naked" payment contract: 35 hour work week, unlimited overtime to be taken of whenever it was possible, 30 days of vacation and 12 weeks of continued pay in case of sickness (6 more weeks than mandatory). Ah, I miss these days...

You are kind of making my point: comparing working in 2 countries has a lot of factors. Non compete might be a minor thing to a lot of people. Disclosure I neither live or work in the US or Germany.

And of that 50% are grabbed by the taxman.

But the service you get from German government is so much better, healthcare is a good example here.

That's paid on top of tax. Otherwise, I agree.

The 50% that most people note includes healthcare, or at least it did from 2009 to 2011.

Still does include healthcare as the other response stated (I'm not able to directly reply).

Self employed consultants are pushed into private healthcare, which will ruin you when you retire (you have to keep paying >>$1000 per month until you die).

The tax rate in the US gets pretty close to 50% when all the municipalities take their cut. If you're in Silicon Valley, most devs are going to be paying a 41%-44% tax rate just from federal and California income tax. Then you've got any local taxes, land taxes, etc that add onto that

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