While it's probably easy to land on your feet and find something with a good pay in SV or London, it's probably not the case everywhere.
4 months of pay for this kind of trouble doesn't look like a good deal to me.
True, those labor laws are under attack, but they still stand, and such layoff would be so costly there that they could hardly happen.
4 months is not generous, it is under the legal minimum in many countries, provided you've been with the employer long enough.
You're going to argue that 4 months severance from FB, where average developer pay is the highest in the world with Sr. Engineers getting $300k in cash compensation is worse than 6-12 months severance from a European tech company, where cash comp is 20% of that?
> would be so costly there that they could hardly happen
This is NOT a good thing
I think this depends on ideology a lot. In europe the sentiment is to improve the life and livelihood of the average person on average, and not that of a few CEOs, and labour laws reflect that.
The cynic inside me tells me this results in universal health care, better infrastructure, less divide between poor and rich and thus less crime on average, ... in europe. In the US you have super rich CEOs fueling policies to make the rich richer. Maybe my reasoning here is not true, but I take these quality of life improvements over all the tech unicorns any time.
The sign of a first world country isn't having a bunch of billionaires - you have those in Brazil and Russia. It's when the poorest people in your country still can have healthy, meaningful lives.
Honestly, from my point of view, the US is a 3rd world country, but I expect that viewpoint to be very controversial.
As someone who lives in a real third-world country...I'm of the opinion that this is a silly thing to say. Yeah, the world's biggest economy ($23T GDP) that constantly sends payloads to outer space and back is third-world...maybe you could come live in a place with 80% of people below the poverty line and see what third-world is.
When a country’s poor can still manage to be overweight, have cell phones, have gaming consoles, have automobiles…your perception of poor might be a tad subjective.
And before folks go off on the “what abouts”, yes I realize there are some folks in the US without those things, but let’s face it, you sample just about any “poor” person in the US, you will find at least 50%+ of the things I listed.
I doubt that you could do that with a random sample of the poor in say Burundi
Maybe "not as good for everyone else", but "hell" is such a big exaggeration. I know plenty of working-class people -- think barbers, construction workers, baristas -- who live happy lives.
The US isn't some dystopia where if you're not a millionaire you're living in a slum.
Please, I live in an area with high taxes and I've yet to see the return on the investment. Healthcare? If you have a minor condition and you can wait or if you have a dangerous condition and you cannot wait then it's great. For all the other illness that are life-damaging but not life-ending? I hope you are rich enough to pay for a private practice. That's what my family has been doing for years on top of the above-mentioned taxes.
As for CEOs compensation: even low earning people in the USA are above average earning in Europe (I repeat, on top of high taxes) while in Europe the best way to make money is through inheritance. Yes, in the USA your parents socio-economic status is very important in giving you a head start but you at least you can participate in the race, while here there's not even a race to speak of; even if I do everything right: STEM degree, programming, speaking multiple languages and so on and on and on... you will probably end up in the same economical status of your parents. And let's not speak about the unemployment of Southern Europe: a different can of worm that has eaten the future of an entire generation, especially men: it is a bomb ready to explode.
The state of Mississippi, which many enjoy comparing to third-world countries, has a higher average disposable household income than does Germany. People, especially Americans of a certain class, have a very twisted view of how wealthy the average European is.
Policies based on good sentiment almost always result in hidden costs that run counter to those sentiments. Strong employees' rights in Europe mean that companies are much more reluctant to hire, since poor performers cannot be let go easily. This is especially devastating to young people who cannot find a foothold in an entry-level job to develop their careers; see youth employment rates in Spain (over a third) or France (one-fifth).
Same with rent control and other tenant protections, which is another sentimental policy that results in poor real-world outcomes. Sweden famously has a national average waitlist nearing a decade for rent-controlled housing, but this problem is by no means limited to Europe; if you compare states in the US with strong tenant rights vs. strong landlord rights, you'll find that the latter has much lower rents at comparable population densities.
> I take these quality of life improvements over all the tech unicorns any time
There has been more immigration from Europe to the US than the other way around for decades, so a lot of people do value the factors that enable those tech unicorns to flourish in the US.
We have plenty of almost unicorns here in Europe, then they tend to be smaller. Albeit the European Union market is roughly equivalent to the USA one in term of population or wealth, it is heavily fragmented legally and culturally. If you want to grow out of your country, you get to address the challenge of various different cultural differences be it for your product, running a business or entirely different laws. And sometime there is not even a market cause your solution is already addressed in some of the other countries.
> You're going to argue that 4 months severance from FB, where average developer pay is the highest in the world with Sr. Engineers getting $300k in cash compensation
Those would involves RSU which I guess do not get vetted, even so 4 months several when having a $300k salaries yields out a $100k severance.
> is worse than 6-12 months severance from a European tech company, where cash comp is 20% of that?
I am not sure it would be that large. At least for France it is 25% of a monthly wage per year of tenure. So for a 5 years employment that would be 1,25 months. Then you get unemployment benefits, usually a package to assist in finding a new job and of course you keep your healthcare coverage. The system is entirely different really. We get less lump sum but have a lot of other benefits which definitely help in rough time.
No it doesn't. Life expectancy in the United states is declining. Perhaps labor law has something to do with it.
This seems a way better treatment than what you would get from labor laws anywhere in Europe.
Compensation = (years worked at company/3)*monthly salary.
This comes on top of the minimum notice period, which is given by:
notice period (in months) = floor(years_worked/5) + 1
In many cases, employers and employees agree that the employee will not work after having received notice, but are asked to be available to help answer questions their replacements might have during this period. The employee still receives their salary during this time (even if they find new employment), so effectively this notice period can be added to their compensation.
So for many employees in the Netherlands, the minimum legal compensation is better than what these employees will receive. In practice their compensation is often better than the minimum legal compensation.