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Comment by djaahk | Hacker News Reader

I always feel like salary comparisons are a little biased by a slightly US-centric definition of a comfortable lifestyle (e.g. including a car, parking, bigger house requirements, etc) as well as underestimating some built-in benefits of other countries like free healthcare.

Are there good sources out there that would afford a holistic cost comparison of a typical London lifestyle (Tube, 1-bedroom in Zone 1-2, weekend abroad in Europe, etc.) vs SF, LA or NY for instance?

Otherwise agree that long-term the work from home trend could be slightly more concerning, but this won't materialise as soon as most think. There is still a lot of value in being physically close to networks of influence and decision-makers, which in the UK would very much still remain in London.

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I get the impression US salaries usually come out way ahead for software people (in other fields, not so much).

The only point where it starts to get questionable is when you consider stuff like, how much would you pay to live in a city that doesn't have needles all over the sidewalks, or, what is the value of living in a society that isn't brutally unfair and visibly dystopian?

Personally, I put a pretty high value on abstract stuff like fraternity and equality, and I feel like it has a really good effect on quality-of-life, but I can also see why people just go for the biggest paycheck. If you're planning on living in a kind of bubble, and just ignore the wider social context, you don't really need to live in a functioning society.

US is a nation of immigrants where you can basically fully integrate in a matter of months. In non-English speaking countries this is impossible. If you put a lot of weight on fraternity and equality you have to consider that if you move to France or Germany you will always be "that foreigner who moved here".

Just something more to consider. Although I do agree also with your post.

You're absolutely right. There are, however, bubbles - I don't know about France, but there are few cities in Germany where you aren't made to feel 'foreign' unless you go to a government office or something. Of course you do occasionally bump into racists, and the concept of integration in Germany is, well, 'assimilation' (literally), but like most countries in Europe, it's very variable.

While this might be true, this is not what I've experienced. I lived in the US for 7 years. I went to school there, worked there and paid taxes. But I had to leave because I didn't get the H1B visa. So while people couldn't tell I was a foreigner, as far as immigration is concerned, I was always a foreigner. Even if I would have gotten the H1B visa, as someone born in India, it would have taken me 20+ years to get a green card...

Yes of course I by no means implied that there are no obstacles involved in immigrating to the US. The OP was talking about the more social aspects so I wanted to remark about an often overlooked aspect.

Yeah, I understand what you mean. I just wanted to point out that often this aspect is also overlooked when it comes to immigration in America. The social aspects mean nothing to me when I could never be certain about my status in the US. In fact if I'd not integrated as much socially, I'd probably be much happier in life right now after having been forced to leave. On the other hand I completely agree with you about the social aspect. I'm worried about how I will fit in to Europe once I move there, and whether I will always be considered a foreigner. I'm trying to convince myself that it's the better choice for me since I was forced to move there. But at the end of the day, I can't help thinking that Europe just doesn't have the same diversity and open culture as California did when I lived there. Who knows, maybe I will be pleasantly surprised when I go there. However, like I said before, in Europe I have certainty about my immigration status. As a highly skilled migrant, I don't have to keep worrying about "What happens if I don't get the H1B visa", "It's been 10 years, and I still haven't received the priority date for my Green Card".

>If you're planning on living in a kind of bubble, and just ignore the wider social context, you don't really need to live in a functioning society.

Your example is also about a bubble. It's not social context but your own personal sense of happiness that you're talking about as I see it. You can have clean streets and little crime but be a dystopian society. Singapore and Japan come to mind. Muslim refugees in France would see society very differently than a native french person. Talking about others living in bubbles seems to me to be just a way to makes oneself feel better about the bubble one lives in themselves.

You might be right - that said, there's no comparison when it comes to poverty between where I live now (east germany) and where I come from (London). Poor people in London are simply far more poor, even though London is far more wealthy than east Germany.

What I was initially pointing at was, if you think about the portion of pay one gets, and the portion of pay that goes to the state, I think high taxation is often worth the money in terms of quality of life, because it delivers goods that are simply beyond anybody's budget otherwise. Jeff Bezos can't go on a 4am walk through LA without a shadow of worry, but I can do that in my city. That's a tangible freedom that I can buy with my paycheck, and he cannot really buy with his.

Obviously money on its own doesn't solve deeper issues - and Europe has a lot of problems, especially around questions of nationality and belonging. But I think in the narrow sense, of what you get for what you pay, high tax - welfare state societies are generally competitive even for very high earners, just because they deliver a lot of things that you literally can't pay for, no matter how rich you are.

>That's a tangible freedom that I can buy with my paycheck, and he cannot really buy with his.

Sure he can, his multiple well armed guards will ensure he is safe even in the worst part of LA at 4am. He also has multiple homes and I guarantee you that his suburban homes have little crime around them. Cities aren't primarily where the well off live in the US and the places they do live are very safe.

The typical London lifestyle for people with a respectable income -- tech money, not finance money -- is more like living in Zone 3 and working in Zone 1. I think there is a lot of proportionality between standard of lifestyle and income between London and expensive US cities, a similar level of income buying a similar lifestyle (adjusted for local context). A big difference is that high incomes are much more widely distributed across industries in the US than London. If you are a middle manager in a boring industry like publishing, you aren't going to get £150k in London but you can in the US, even outside the big cities. The diversity of people that can afford an upper-middle class lifestyle in the US is much greater. Even dialing back US standards of lifestyle to something contextually appropriate, the kind of work that affords a "comfortable" lifestyle is much narrower in London.

An under-rated feature of US cities is the diversity of occupations that can command relatively high incomes. London does this better than many European cities but it still has a long way to go. Living on a tech salary in London is a bit like living on a good non-tech salary in SF or Seattle. Comfortable in the abstract but there is visibly a tier of people that the city culture values much more.

> An under-rated feature of US cities is the diversity of occupations that can command relatively high incomes.

I find this super interesting, especially when linking salary back to how much society values that job type. For instance it seems that many European countries value societally their teachers and professors, yet it is a rather underpaid profession, all things considered. Similarly, a maitre d’ would be quite well regarded in France or Italie, yet would not command a high-salary.

Thus it feels like your point on there being more diverse sectors being cogent with a comfortable lifestyle in the U.S. rings true.

Veering away from the main point, but I wonder if, as pointed in other comments, that is somewhat balanced by less people being, comparatively, in the poor and very poor category. That is to say, less of a difference between top lifestyles and bottom lifestyles overall. I would need to properly research that though, as salary alone won’t give us that variance.

A large part of the income distribution differences result from wages being very compressed around the median for a given occupation in Europe. For most occupations in the US, the top 5% earn much more money than the median person in their occupation (or the population generally), even for occupations like waiters and cleaners that we don't think of as high-paying. This creates a different set of expectations culturally; everyone knows at least a few enterprising people that make a surprising amount of money doing nominally low-wage, low-status work and therefore having access to a visibly comfortable life.

I think "poor" is relative to cultural expectations, so I am not sure how to measure that over different geographic regions. The infamously poverty-stricken regions of the US, like Appalachia or Mississippi, really do have serious systemic poverty but even the middle-class there is often viewed as poor by the standards of other regions. However, the lifestyle afforded by the 40th percentile household income in most European countries would identify as "poor" in much of the US, despite being definitionally middle-class. In much of the US, "poverty" is primarily associated with social problems like drugs and crime, not economic resource issues per se outside of a few sparsely populated regions, which isn't that different than what I see in Europe. I grew up in abject poverty of non-social kind, which is pretty rare in the US. In hindsight, I think the government did a reasonable job of handling that case.

>A big difference is that high incomes are much more widely distributed across industries in the US than London.

[...]

>An under-rated feature of US cities is the diversity of occupations that can command relatively high incomes.

The way I've explained this to people is that it's entirely possible in the US to rise to the top of your profession in any industry without ever moving to NY or LA, except maybe finance for NY and film/television for LA.[1] The equivalent is possible in Australia, Canada, and Germany, but impossible in the UK or France.

[1] And even here there are exceptions. For the entirety of the century that Hollywood has been "Hollywood", the creative types in LA have worked under control of the money men in NY. This is still true, except that the money men are now also in Dallas (AT&T), Philadelphia (Comcast), or Tokyo (Sony). In finance, one can become a managing director at a New York investment bank while always based in a regional office like Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, or San Francisco (I think Byron Trott never left Chicago during his Goldman career).

>as underestimating some built-in benefits of other countries like free healthcare.

If you're at FAANG (which the original post was talking about) then there's little advantage of free healthcare imho. You get top of the line company paid for healthcare. You can see a top specialist in a week with no referrals needed and someone almost as good same day.

That is a given for every resident in most European countries.

Edit: it seems I am wrong. I commented a bit too fast.

That's not true. For example in Germany there is an explicit difference between statutory healthcare and private healthcare. Private healthcare will get you to the front of the line and will give you easy access to all services. With statutory healthcare you will have to go around searching for specialists who have time for you, as most will refuse you on account of them being "fully booked".

I'm a German with statutory healthcare.

> most [specialists] will refuse you on account of them being "fully booked"

I don't deny that this does happen, but it's not as inevitable as you make it sound. I've seen about a dozen separate specialists over the years for various reasons, and have never had such problems. There were a few outliers where I had to wait several weeks for an appointment, but that was only for non-urgent matters and I was never refused service. In most cases, I can get an appointment within 1-5 days of calling the doctor's office.

My suspicion is that such overload as you describe is a regional issue, so if, as an immigrant, you need to rely on certain specialists because of chronic ailments, it may be worth to investigate the availability of the relevant specialist doctor beforehand.

>That is a given for every resident in most European countries.

Based on what I've heard it's not a given in the UK for example. Need non-guaranteed GP referral (ie: they may say no) for a specialist and there's often a long waiting period.

Even if it were a given, the point I believe they were trying to make was in addition to the much larger salary, they ALSO have good healthcare

That’s a really good point. My understanding however was that you still need to pay some parts of the treatments, even with top healthcare?

I’m no specialist on the US system, so could be wrong, but I heard from a friend who paid $4K cash for a broken ankle (arguably out of a total bill of $25K+, and not sure what type of healthcare they had), whereas your bill in the U.K., France or Spain for the same injury would be exactly zero (as an example, from countries I know better). The same would be true, I believe, for child birth for instance (again, I could be wrong as relying on second-hand accounts in both cases).

Agreed on the type of specialist you would get in the U.K., although in my experience it’s always been very feasible to see top specialists when warranted, even on public healthcare. You would typically get faster access for non-essential care on a private basis though.

Overall, it seems from Yours and other comments that the salary multiple in U.S. tech specifically may still be significant and would probably make these moot.

>I’m no specialist on the US system, so could be wrong, but I heard from a friend who paid $4K cash for a broken ankle (arguably out of a total bill of $25K+, and not sure what type of healthcare they had), whereas your bill in the U.K., France or Spain for the same injury would be exactly zero (as an example, from countries I know better)

UK, yes. In France, aren't there copayments? I thought the French system typically covers 70% of hospital bills.

Agree direct comparison is tough and multifactored and would be highly individual (how do you put a price on being a 2 hr train ride away from Paris whilst having much better job opportunities than Parisians). However, given that compensation in US is a large multiple higher I think it would be easy to agree it's better overall. For comparison Big Law pays 20-30% lower on average in London vs. NYC and finance pays marginally lower (outside of quant finance where London pays a lot lower than NYC as hedge funds don't have to compete with FANGs for tech talent that wants high pay).

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