You have to take cost of living into account as well if you’re going to compare international salary differences.
Spending $1.5k on healthcare a month in exchange for double or triple the salary is worth it, by a long shot.
This isn't a religious debate, it would be great to be a developer in a friendly and beautiful EU country for me personally, but not if my salary is slashed to the bone to do so.
The EU is not competitive in the tech market at all, and especially not for senior level contributors.
According to Payscale, Senior Developers in Sweden earn roughly the equivalent of $70k USD. That's the biggest shafting I've ever seen.
$1.5k / month was my total cost of living as single! That was owning my own condo with 15 minutes bike ride to Stockholm city center. The rest I mostly used for vacation trips and did 4-5 (one week each) every year. No need to save for unexpected health care bills, your unborned kids college education, grandmas retirement home, that car you need to buy to commute 1 hour to your job etc.
That 3x salary comes with a really high price! In reality I would probably not make more than 120k / year in the US though. With that said, I can understand that some people really enjoy spending most of their lives working for the man, and getting a high salary and skipping out on vacations and work life balance. But not for me.
I work for a big multinational co that grants me 15 days off in a year, but bigco does not celebrate most holidays. The next holiday we will have, that does not count towards PTO after New Years Day, is July 4, 2021... 5-6 weeks off sounds amazing.
I've got colleagues in EU, China and other places and they all seem to have better benefits (mandated by the govt) compared to how things are in the states. US corporations seem to only see humans as resources.
Second, there's work/life balance, for example you can look at annual workhours and see there's a 350 hour gap between the US and Sweden: https://clockify.me/assets/images/working-hours/oecd-hours-w...
350 hours is equivalent to 8.75 weeks (or more than 2 months) of 8 hour, 5-day workweeks. That's a massive difference.
Second, Sweden has free education. Being a top 5% earner in the US sometimes comes easy, but often times you're looking at medschool, lawschool or CS or whatever, that can set you back anywhere from 30k to 250k, with 7% average student loan interest rates.
Stuff like this can put a massive weight on your shoulders from age 18 til 38 or so, constantly climbing a corporate ladder, working crazy hours, and paying off a massive debt. All the while fearing that an economic crisis or some kind of disability leading to unemployment, can ruin you. In a country like Sweden there's no such weight on your shoulders, subsidised, and a massive social safety net. Quality of life is quite stable, and you can both very much enjoy student life, and your life right after, all the way til old age, with a healthy work/life balance.
You also don't have to live in a city that you share with an extremely poor underclass, homelessness, crime, drug addiction, while paying a million for a single bedroom.
Of course I'm not saying everyone in tech is working 80 hours and getting crushed by debt while working in an overpriced city with some minor dystopian undertones. But when looking at these things, Sweden and the US are certainly on opposite sides of the spectrum. And it must be taken into account when looking at pay.
I'd love to move to the US for some time, the natural parks are amazing, I like the culture and the vibe. But work/life balance, the lack of safety net if you're unlucky and the general state of the country for many of its people, are repelling me. I've never thought of pay as something that attracts me to the US, it's really not worth it for me because I'm not lacking anything (although I do make about $100k equivalent in western Europe, but even at much lower salaries when I was younger I loved it here).