Google and Amazon Struggle to Lay Off Workers in Europe Due to Labor Laws
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I've had a few European teammates, and they usually come to the U.S. because they can make 3-5x what they could in Europe. You'll see that a lot in HN comments, where people talk about USD$400K FAANG compensation and European developers will be like "Dang, WTF, I'm just sitting here with my €70K salary".
Right now, going into a bust, everybody wants downside protection. You often make more over the long-term accepting some risk to pick the upside when it's available, though.
I think it's likely that the difference in labour laws is a contributing factor. Switzerland has very little by way of worker protection, instead placing a significant emphasis on unemployment insurance (Arbeitslosenversicherung).
How does the parent commenter acknowledging a single factor in a situation lead you to believe that they assume no other contributing factors exist?
And as we know, the only difference between us and Europe is labor laws. /s
To be clear, that cohort is entitled to the protections they so often reference. What I'm saying specifically is that sometimes it shows. Perhaps it's a vocal minority, and this doesn't actually reflect a wider trend, I don't know. Some of the rhetoric I've encountered from this cohort though has come off as downright hostile towards businesses.
And if you expect help from the government, you need to show that your layoffs actually have a chance to make your company survive. For example, you cannot fire the entire R&D when you are 1 year from product release.
My percentiles are based on Payscale data.
As most things, the comparison is dependent on what state of life you’re at and your preferences.
Of course this varies state by state, but generally for tech, you net more in US on the average even when you pay for everything that you get with taxes in EU. Starting salaries even outside fang could easily be in like $130k in areas that aren't tech hubs and don't have an inflated COL - in EU this is unheard of.
Starting salary in US for SDE is probably like 100k. Going of single income tax filings your approximate aggregate tax rate will be ~%15. if you have state income tax, prolly like ~20% aggregate.
In Germany you would start at something like $70k and get a 42% tax rate afaik.
So right there you get more than twice the money left over after taxes.
Living costs would probably be close to each other, rent is probably cheaper in Germany cities but groceries and goods are more expensive.
And health insurance and costs are a small percentage of the salary.
The only big difference is that in US you sort of need a car, but again, with monthly cost of a finance for a car you are still not hitting
The biggest difference in cost comes when you start having kids - in US you pay closer to 25% income for all things child related, so that eats into the extra money real quick. For outside of tech, if you make middle class salary in the 70k range, you are much better off in EU, because a lot of things are heavily subsidized.
Wealth inequality for instance is something that permeates political discourse. Americans don't give a shit about it at all. Making society nicer for everyone and not leaving anyone behind.
In the short term, Europe is much better at this than the US, but the long term sustainability of the European welfare state will be under serious threat over the next 50 years due to the horrible demographics of most European countries
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Spain
Massive bulges over 40 that will require support from a shrinking base of young people.
A friend of mine with a VERY sick disabled kid which prevented her from working night shifts in a home for the elderly would probably have gotten sacked by now hadn't it been for the Swedish labour laws that mandate that the employer tries to find a different position within the same qualifications in the same organisation. Sure, the union had to help and remind them of that obligation, but in the end it worked out for the best for my friend.
I don't think the laws are there to protect someone like me that could get another job, but to protect people like my friend.
Strong worker protection ends up making the cost of hiring new workers higher. Companies react to those costs by a number of means like delaying hiring, hiring contractors first, firing within the probation period when they might not have normally, etc, etc. Whenever the laws are changed, a new "optimum approach" is developed.
And like rent control, labor laws often benefit the people who already rent/have a job. For people who are looking to rent/looking for a job, they can make it harder as the barriers to entry just got higher.
It's not right or wrong, it's just a trade off.
In the case of rent control -- landlords and future renters suffer. In the case the employment -- it's employers and future workers.
i don't know how rentcontrol works elsewhere, but in germany generally it means that rent can't be raised more than once a year or 15 months or something in that range, and it can't be raised more than a few percent each time, but it doesn't mean that it can't be raised at all. not being able to evict a tenant is independent of that.
the general issue here is a power differential. big company vs small family. i know in the US there are more small landlords who only have a few houses or even one. but that is rare in germany. most are bigger businesses with hundreds of apartments, and with that the risk of getting a bad tenant is obviously larger, but the financial risk is also spread over all tenants.
There's many factors in this conversation
Certainly not compared to Europe/UK. I have friends that moved there and have spent many weeks over there myself. Property, living expenses, taxes, and many goods are generally noticeably higher over there.
This is complicated, and it’s insufficient just to state that everything in Europe is generally more expensive than in the US.
For example the "code du travail" is excessively complex as it describes many kind of different private sector workers with very different rights.
As a rule of thumb if you work in a large company you are well protected. In other cases it's very different, which partly explains the violence in the society.
What's that about? Could you please explain?
If you need labour laws beyond basic safety stuff then you're simply not being paid enough.
I would far rather have sufficient income and therefore wealth built to be able to choose for myself whether I want to take time off.
I actually find it juvenile that people want employment to be this way.
What do they think is going to happen when they stop working? Or is the plan - again a juvenile one, seeking a parental figure - "I'll just work for a company until I die"? Have fun with that...
Google could easily put these people in making more money.
But instead they launch weird products like their Blockchain service, miss out on AI etc.
Google Io is in May, if they don't announce google personal ai assistant they don't have enough visionary people.
When companies can invest money, they do so without concern for long term in the hopes that they can just bruteforce project with manpower and make something stick. If you don't participate in this, you risk missing out establishing a product that has long term staying power and thus long term revenue.
So it figures that when these costs start running high, things get cut. And when everyone is downsizing, and you don't and instead choose to invest, you risk losing money on a failed product that you could have spent later on something profitable.
They have plenty of services to make better or add features like Google cloud.
They can do things like what Ms does: have multiple dominating products and still have no issues with companies using azure.
Google just could disrupt any industry the wish.
They could spend much more on enabling 3th world / emerging countries
> Youth unemployment is notoriously high in France, in particular for the low-skilled. Within the EU, only the crisis countries of Southern Europe fare worse. This report delivered to the French Council of Economic Analysis analyzes the causes and consequences of this alarming trend. In addition, drawing on the available evidence on various measures that could improve the current situation, concrete policies proposals are derived that cover the areas of vocational education, second chance programs, job search assistance, income support, employment subsidies and dismissal protection.
Why Is Unemployment in France So High? - https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781557754912/ch01...
> With regard to the demand-side causes of long-term unemployment, employers faced with continued uncertainty about future orders may refrain from recruitment for long periods of time, causing the persistence of both unemployment and long-term unemployment, particularly if wages are not flexible. Labor market rigidities, such as the relative generosity of long-term benefits, employment protection legislation, the minimum wage, and high employer costs are other potential contributory factors.
> ...
> The 1986 work dismissal legislation in France requires that those being dismissed are given one to two months’ written notice of dismissal and informed in writing of the reasons for their dismissal. At the same time this legislation removed the need to seek the permission of the Labor Ministry for collective dismissals. Other legislation in 1989 obliged companies to prove the cause of dismissal. The law in France also requires that workers be paid up to a maximum of one and a half months’ salary as severance pay. Though the legal restrictions on dismissal in France are less strict than those in the southern European countries, they are more strict than those outside Europe, particularly in the United States.
To be succinct, I'm from Spain, here you can fire anyone for no reason whenever you feel like it. If you do so out of a whim, you have to pay about ~20 days per each year that employee worked in your organization. This is the worst case scenario. What everyone refers to "you can't fire people in Europe".
There are other circumstances in which letting someone go might get you in trouble (as in having to re-admit that individual). Such cases include letting someone go for ethnical reasons, pregnancy, illness, etc. You can get sued and after a due trial you might need to re-admit that employee and pay a fine. To put things in perspective, I have a close friend that got fired just when his company learned he had cancer (by a coworker). They went to trial (one year later) and the judge solved the case by an agreement where my friend got about ~3,000e (something negligible).
Obviously, there are many other cases in which you can fire an employee without paying them anything. If the employee is not doing her job (not being on time, bad service, etc) you need to go through some hoops (filling fault forms) to justify letting that person go without any kind of compensation - this is similar to the US when someone is not performing and you want to let them go. Another case is if the company is losing money (which is different from predicting future loses or worsening its performance).
The latter case is the one that companies like Google, Meta, etc are going through. They are not going bankrupt. They are actually having humungous benefits. The only thing that is preventing them from letting people go is that 1-month/year compensation I mentioned above. In some countries, these laws might differ a little bit, but I imagine they are cut from the same cloth.
At the end of the day, in most situations, this does not differ that much from companies in the US where you are not entitled to any compensation but companies still give you some money to avoid any future lawsuits.
For the regular Joe procrastinating in HN, these laws have close to no impact in their welfare because they are not part of a vulnerable strata of society. They won't be working in a McDonalds or a car factory in their 50's, and luckily cancer won't come knocking their door at their 30's or 40's before they had the opportunity to save as much money as they can with their IT jobs. However, for the people that are not that fortunate, being able to look for a job for 3 months after you got fired (so your past company could hire someone younger and more productive) is a blessing. Same as if you fall ill for a year and your non-IT job didn't let you save enough money.
Neoliberalism is great for those who are well established in life. For those that when tragedy (death, illness, depression, simply bad luck) knocks their doors are well prepared both economically and mentally. For the rest, it's a hole that they might not be able to escape for the rest of their lives, which will have an impact in younger generations.
On my side, I'm extremely grateful we have these laws protecting those who need it the most, even if (hopefully) I might never need them.
I'm ~30, from Spain, my parents' family were immigrants (from inside Spain), living in what today would be seen as extreme harsh conditions. At the time of my parents, university was only for rich people. However, I had the luck to go to the world top109 and Europe's top14 engineering university for almost no money (1,000e/year). Today I have an IT job, working from Spain for a company from abroad, making more money than I need, and being grateful my taxes are high and I don't need to worry too much that an enraged homeless/crackhead do me any serious harm.