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Comment by tolbish | Hacker News Reader

Careful what you wish for. The US has no guaranteed paternity/maternity leave, and the majority of workplaces have less than a month of vacation time. Then there is the healthcare system.

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> Then there is the healthcare system.

European healthcare systems are not exactly dream come true either. Range of treatments available/covered and waiting times can be significantly behind the US. US healthcare is actually great for an SWE making bank at a FAANG & co. Just not that amazing for common folks

> The US has no guaranteed paternity/maternity leave

Top tech companies all have those, it's a fairly cheap perk to provide to attract the talent

> and the majority of workplaces have less than a month of vacation time

I have just 20 days here in UK (on top of public holidays) too

I don't really recognise the first concern you raise, but that might also be due to the fact that viewing all European countries as the same in this regard might be overgeneralising.

Yeah there's certainly some differences between countries, but in most of Europe it seems to me healthcare is directly or indirectly largely run by the government. Whereas in US (and also Switzerland, btw, has which US-like model but without most of downsides) it's privately run. This causes difference in incentives to doctors. In the latter systems, doctors are incentivized to spend more time on you, spare no expense, get you the best treatment possible, but it is not cheap. In the former, they are incentivized to do the bare minimum

I agree that the healthcare system isn't a dream from what I hear. The main thing I see with the parent's comment though is that in the US you might be making $100k, but paying $15-20k in insurance costs. Whereas you might only be making $80k in the EU but you don't have that same insurance costs. I see this as being the same cost (ignoring the other factors per the OPs request) but just hiding the cost from the employee. Same sort of thing can be seen in the US if you compare the taxes a regular employee pays and a self employed person pays.

The thing is in the US, generally the more you make the lower your insurance costs are.

I made ~$300k last year at a FAANG (Sr. engineer), and my healthcare costs were:

$29/month in premiums $200/month in an HSA, which I'm saving for retirement (complicated US income tax reasons), so money I don't available for my use but it doesn't go into a black hole either. $1500 deducible $3000 total out of pocket

I had a sudden health condition last year, before covid fortunatly, so I maxed out my insurance. So my total costs ended up being $3348 + HSA contributions.

I'm in Washington State, so there's no state income tax, my effective federal tax rate will probably be about 27%.

I'd love to Europe, but it's hard looking at the numbers to justify it. Even if I were willing to take a 50% cut in take home pay, I doubt I could find a job that paid that much.

It takes a bit more structuring but $300k is not impossible. Especially if you have management skills and good communication skills next to solid tech chops.

True, the better jobs tend to have better benefits to go along with the better pay. I'm non-FAANG, making less than a third of you and my max out of pocket is $7k with a $3500 deductible and something like $7k in premiums. My kid has a condition now and so I will be hitting the max out of pocket every year or close to it.

So my comment was intended to apply generally. I can certainly see that there could be some outliers that this wouldn't apply to. I feel like SV and FAANG sort of fall into that category. I think many of us never make close to that money (or maybe I'm just a loser). I think I'll top out at $120k (today's value) if I have some career advancement, which seems unlikely. The US average (median?) for a developer is about $95k.

By less than 1 month vacation, I think it's closer to 1-2 weeks/year and that's at big companies. Most of the startups will give you grief if you take more than a week of vacation on top of the holidays.

Not all engineers are at FAANG, we can't compare the average to the top tier companies.

Can anyone name names? My US bank employer gives US workers three weeks vacation which is the same here in Canada where wages are also low.

I’m unaware of any big companies that do less then two weeks a year of vacation for their salaried employees. There might be some, but it is uncommon.

Across all workers in the U.S., the average after 5 years is 15 vacation days, with 8-10 additional holidays and a more variable amount of sick leave (https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/mobile/private-industry-wo...)

Now Americans are notoriously bad about actually taking all our vacation in a year, but the limited data I see suggests that we still on average take more than 2 weeks a year.

Edit- grammar

The U.S. Wage, minus paying for your own health care, minus saving for your own (p|m)aternity leave, is still greater than the European wage, at least for the Software Engineering career track.

The calculation is probably more favorable to traditional middle class jobs in Europe.

I wonder what the pension/retirement system differences would like like too.

The american average vacation time is not the reality at tech firms. I easily get 1 month or more of vacation working at a large one. Same with 3-6mo+parental leave being very common along with fairly decent healthcare because your employed by a wealthy company.

Things that are not good for the average american is not the reality for the average big-tech software engineer and you have to compare apples to apples.

The average among technical workers is around 15 days/year according to the BLS. Where are you getting your data from?

I talk to others who work at big tech firms.

That survey probably also includes such stars as tata, infosys, random IT firms and places you wouldn't call SV style software. Yes, you shouldn't move from europe to work at such places. What everyone is implying is working in SV or FANG tier places.

On the upside, in the USA, if you can find that 'sweet spot' company that is paying well, good healthcare, and good time off, you can make bank without overworking. I'm sure these exist all around the world, but perhaps they could be more common in the USA when compared to the EU, given the generally lower EU net wages we're talking about.

Its seems the obvious thing do is build a career in the US and half retire in a foreign country with good free healthcare and affordable rent. Rent out the american real estate bought over the course of the career and have that income pay for the European rent(which in my experience seems much lower).

Dual citizen here, that's precisely my plan. Just found out a couple weeks ago (from HN) how in the Netherlands and Germany you can request to work 4 days a week instead of 5, for 20% less gross pay, I guess its a smaller cut after taxes because you might drop down a tax bracket. As long as the company has 15+ employees. I partied a ton in my early twenties so I'm early in my career despite my age, but the plan is to live very frugally and buy several 2 family houses in low CoL areas to rent out. Then after 5 ish years depending on if I have a family or what, semi retire to Europe.

I don't think any of these reasons explain why European SWE salaries are so low and I don't think they need to be compromised in order to raise wages.

Care to elaborate?

I don’t buy the idea that employing people in Europe is so expensive because of these benefit programs that wages are lowered to compensate.

Some of those costs aren’t even borne by the employer.

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