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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Independent of the tongue-in-cheek joke of this post, software salaries in the US are triple (or more) than those in Europe, I'd rather keep the tradeoffs we have even if that means there are downsides - the upsides are worth it.

I suspect the labor protections in Europe are part of the reason there aren't many billion dollar software companies there and the salaries are low, hiring is risky when firing is hard.

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Is it really triple, or is that just looking at FAANG? I'd imagine US average to be low to mid 100k. Looking at Germany as an example, it seems their average is 70k Euros, so more than half?

Then there's health insurance which never stops going up, and having to save a large portion of each check for our own retirements because when we're past 50 we're relegated to greeting at WalMart.

I'm not sure which is better, since each Euro country is different and such, but just looking at salary numbers isn't much to go on.

There are places like HK and Singapore where firing is super easy, yet the software industry in those places still pales to USA and even to Europe in some cases

The population is not comparable though. I guess that's why many people compare US to Europe, and not US to Sweden.

It depends. Yes, the salaries are lower, but so are the expenses on average. The fringe benefits are usually good. There's a legal minimum amount of paid holiday days, in my country the minimum is 20/year but some unions have close to 40. There's also a legal maximum amount of allowed overtime, the employer pays a part of the employee's pension in my country et cetera.

It's probably true that it's easier to upscale a company in the US. The hire and fire strategy wouldn't work here as it would only attract poorly educated people that are willing to take any job. It may be a cultural difference, but most middle class people like to have financial stability here, even if payment is lower in that case.

I think that for software companies, the history of computers plays a big role as well. US has always been at the forefront when it comes to hardware, (military) investments and research of integrated circuits and computers, which led to big companies like IBM and subsequently Silicon Valley companies like Apple and MS. I think it may not be the best example because there isn't really any other country or continent that equals the US here, regardless of wages and labor rules.

Over the years, I have some to realize that each country has its own warts. Looking across the pond, eg. UK seems to be in a much worse condition than the US in spite of having a big safety net (healthcare, colleges etc).

> I suspect the labor protections in Europe are part of the reason there aren't many billion dollar software companies there

Care to elaborate on why this is a bad thing? Also, software salaries are not all salaries and are probably not all that representative to the bigger picture.

Growth makes people rich, billion dollar companies create a lot of wealth and the US is a very rich country in part because of this.

Some employees that capture a piece of that wealth funnel it back into more startups/growth (Silicon Valley) creating more jobs, more growth and more wealth (not to mention whatever the new startup is doing is usually creating a new thing people want too).

Software salaries are extremely high, but software companies in the US pay a lot in non software roles too.

On net you end up way in a way richer society that operates this way vs. one that incentivizes not operating this way.

That doesn't mean there should be zero protections from abuse, but it's important to be cautious about the net effect of these sorts of regulations and how you can end up trapped in a worse local maximum because of them.

In a society where you can take bigger risks, make bigger bets, you can get a lot bigger wins at scale. I think that's a good/important thing.

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