You'll have all of those things at the companies listed in this PDF with the exclusion of protected employment. I'm fine with that.

This is true, but these benefits are not necessarily exactly as good as they look on paper.

For example, I work in London, and I routinely have to resort to private medical healthcare because wait times at my borough NHS clinic can be 2-3 weeks, even before COVID-19 hit. In one serious incident, I was not able to be seen at either a local GP or a local 'walk-in' emergency room due to standard winter capacity issues, and so had to shell out 250 quid to see a private GP, who didn't even have the equipment to suture me up, so my friend, who works as an NHS GP, did it for me in his apartment. Dental coverage is extremely limited here too, although it does cover basic cleaning/checkup services (so it's better than Canada in that regard).

As for days PTO - sure, but it's going to depend again on the company. You may or may not be able to actually take that PTO at fear of reprisal (indirectly or directly). At least on paper they can't stop you from doing it I guess. Fair point on the maternity as far as I can tell.

At the end of the day, would I trade the above benefits (with the exception of maternity leave) for 200k USD per year? Uh - yeah, for sure.

The engineers working at these companies in the slides get all of that too, except the not at-will employment. But even if they didn't, the entry-level engineer could pay for all of that and still have way more money left than most any SWE in Europe, regardless of seniority. And that money probably gets them better health care than most Europeans, too.

If you're pulling a gigantic salary at one of these companies, you almost certainly have healthcare, generous PTO, and generous maternity offerings as part of the package too.

It's not really that different for most of these companies. They'll typically have good health insurance either fully-paid or heavily subsidized, probably at least 15 days PTO, often paternal leave, etc.

Just to preface this: I’m actually not disagreeing with you.

The issue with the above is that the top software engineers earn less than they could otherwise. Thus, the very top engineers will always be looking to move to the United States. This kind of decapitates the European tech ecosystem. It’s actually one of my theories for why we see the very different tech ecosystems in America and the EU.