Comment by _petronius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _petronius | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who grew up in the US, and works as a software engineer in Europe, I can't understand why anyone would ever choose to work as a developer in America. :)

I have a very high quality of life here, strong protections as a permanent employee (increasingly less common in other industries in Germany, but not in tech!), a salary that is excellent compared to many of my peers, and comes with a purchasing power that I imagine meets or exceeds someone in my same position in New York or the Bay Area.

I won't pretend there aren't downsides (for example, stock as compensation is rare here, and not incentivised by the legal situation), but for me the upsides win over raw actuarial comparisons. I'd much rather have my compensation in Berlin than trade it for 2x or even 4x that in the US.

(Edit to add: once you bring rent, medical insurance and associated out-of-pocket costs, and paid time off into the picture, compensation in the US starts to look like a pretty raw deal IMO.)

I'm from New Zealand, but work in Europe. Recently I started working remotely for an American firm part-time. Those few hours I work for the Americans equates to about 3x the amount of stress from my EU job but with absolutely no protection (at-will clauses). There is such a palpable difference in culture, management style that I am fairly certain I would never work for an American firm again.

Out of curiosity, what were some of the differences in work culture you experienced? I've never worked outside the U.S., so would be interested to hear a different perspective.

Not OP - but I've worked with American and non-American tech companies. For similar-sized companies, my experience was that American companies are more obsessed with productivity and metrics, with more frequent meetings involving people who don't need to be present (including at least one one who is a level or 2 too high, but justify their presence by having to say something which occasionally derails the meeting).

On a purely subjective note: American work culture has lower trust and attempts to extract much more "productivity" from people doing the work compared to European companies, which is not always proportional to the salary differences. My sample size is fairly small (<5)

> comes with a purchasing power that I imagine meets or exceeds someone in my same position in New York or the Bay Area

That seems very unlikely. Housing is expensive in most of the major metropolitan areas in the US, but you more than make up for it with higher salaries.

The rest of your argument makes perfectly good sense, there's lots to love about living and working in Europe! It may well be worth it to you.

But it's disingenuous to mix those quality of life arguments with an argument about money. Tech workers in the US tech hubs live a financially/materially more comfortable life than those in Europe.

> But it's disingenuous to mix those quality of life arguments with an argument about money.

Genuinely don't understand why you would see these as disconnected from each other.

> Tech workers in the US tech hubs live a financially/materially more comfortable life than those in Europe.

Obviously as you can see from my comment above, I disagree with this view.

I'd rather have free time and enjoy a modest life than have little time and have all the money in the world but can buy anything I want.

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