In many tech companies, you have "unlimited" vacation. You can probably take more vacation that you already get in Europe. This is true of my company, mParticle.
I can work 9-to-5 as an employee. That is the culture of the company that I work for.
People can choose to work remotely or in an office.
I’ve always heard that places like this tend to pressure you into not taking many days or taking a more “normal” amount.
I just started a job with unlimited vacation, so I’ll have to see how it goes. I think best case is I can have more shorter stints through the year.
In European workplace culture, the demands of the work tend to be immaterial to the amount of vacation you can take. If things are busy, it's up to your boss to figure out how to handle them while you are away. If they can't do that, it's seen as their failure, not yours. However, if your employer knows in advance that things will be busy, they have a limited ability to adjust the timing of your vacation, but they usually have to do that months in advance.
Few US companies offer most of the benefits Europeans expect, from free/cheap health care to child care to generous maternity/paternity leave to low tuition to job security to strictly enforced equal opportunity.
Combine all of those into one employer in the US? That unicorn doesn't exist. However such beasts live all over Europe. But they just don't pay US wages, perhaps for obvious reasons.
What's more, as soon as US companies hire remotely en masse in Europe, regulators there will surely demand the same benefits & protections for their people from remote employers. This will erase the economic advantages of outsourcing there unless wages paid there are substantially lower than in the US.
If US company doesn't have a local office in that European country they can't anyway offer a normal employment contract, that has never been possible. Social security, healthcare, pension needs to be paid. So either the employee is a freelancer, or company has an office in the same country to pay the employer's dues.
This applies to intra-EU work too, someone living in Germany can't accept a regular employment position in a Spanish company remotely.
This is important!
The labor market in most EU countries is very strictly regulated, mostly to the benefit of the employees. If the company you try to work for does not have a branch in your country (chances are, they don't) then there is a huge bureaucratic burden and sometimes even a legal grey area.
Speaking from a German perspective, its barely worth it to try to apply for a remote position at Facebook (at least based on the salaries I've found). As a contractor you'd have to battle a huge administrative effort in terms of social security and healthcare, not to mention that everything is more expensive as a freelancer since there is no employer contribution to your healthcare payments. In the end you may end up with slightly more money in the bank, but with fewer employee protections and a huge administrative burden. So I'd really question if it's really worth it.
However, Germany is actually a market with decently high salaries for the IT sector, unlike some other countries like Italy. So I could imagine that there is significant demand from other EU countries
You have to deal with more paperwork, but in my experience it definitely is worth the trouble to become an independent contractor in Germany -- also if you work only for local companies. Generally with local work you can expect to earn at least double as a freelancer, though I'm sure there are some niches that pay well also for regular employment positions.