Is Europe better than America for working in tech?
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"...our incomes are comically higher for skilled persons than European salaries. I literally make 10 times what my French counterpart would in my profession and with a much lower tax rate so the real difference is even larger. I could work for 5 years and retire in France wealthier than if I had worked a 40 year career in France."
This is assuming only 40 hours a week, pick up more shifts and the numbers become even sillier. I suspect that most (if not all) professions could say the same although the magnitude of difference might be a bit smaller. Even if I lived in the EU and never wanted to leave, I'd ride out some years in the US to get life properly rolling back home.
If you prefer having a chance at making mind-bending levels of compensation, the USA is better.
On balance, if you want to make very good but not astonishing levels of money but remain in Europe, go to Switzerland and work for a bank while you still can. I'm not saying it's fun, just lucrative.
Are you referring to ageism or is banking moving out of Switzerland?
Semi relatedly, big tech has US tier comp in Zurich and I’ve never really been sure why. Is the market rate there driven up that much by the banks? What about London?
Google's salaries in Europe never really made sense
It's probably driven up simply by the cost of living. Switzerland is a very expensive place to live compared to most of Europe. Just look at how much hotels cost there for a vacation, and then compare to some nearby cities in Italy or Germany or Austria.
As of when I departed, nobody was being shoved out of their seat, but people who left weren't being replaced in-country unless their job involved turning a crank that had to be physically located in Switzerland. If the crank could be moved, it got moved. Perqs like company cars and a special restaurant for execs and boni 2* comp are long gone for newcomers.
Also there are half as many huge banks in Switzerland as there were a little over a year ago, and there certainly aren't twice as many jobs in that one remaining huge bank as there were a little over a year ago, because of economies of scale.
As for comp: Zurich is expensive, Switzerland is expensive, and the FAANGS have to kick out proper comp to attract people because EVERYTHING pays good money. A semi-skilled entry-level physical laborer at one of the financials can come in the door at nearly 100k, because that person has to be able to pay rent and food, too. But it's not more expensive than California. My rent on a 3-storey townhouse with parking in a close Zurich suburb on the train line was 2250 CHF, and I bought our food at Lidl and Aldi for maybe 150/week. Health insurance 550/mo for both of us. You'll pay that kind of money for rent and food in Dublin these days on a far lower salary, and you'll lose a lot more than 10-15% to tax, as well. Switzerland is a special place.
Big tech has fantastic comp anywhere for the right person, tho! A FOAF at a FAANG in Poland recently bought outright a new-build $500k house with 3 years of salary-derived savings and bonus.
Another good option is the lottery.
Some people are willing to gamble and for this security, and others are not. Personally, a desk job with some politics does not sound like a bad tradeoff. You might have to live away from family for a little while, but you would be setting descendants up very well.
Right, but it's also 0.1% vs 100%.
As far as I understand, the quality of life from the benefits has already been dropping, and with the demographic trends the way they are, the younger cohorts might not be so lucky.
- A full time working week is 38h by law. If you do work 40h, you get that time (so 12 days/year) back to compensate. There are talks about a 34h workweek, but that seems unlikely in the near future IMO. We tend to have 30m lunch breaks, not the 2h long siesta like in the south.
- You are required to take your holidays. Your employer can get in serious trouble if you don't, so "leaving vacations days unused" almost doesn't exist. Some systems allow you to transfer your extra legal holidays to next year, but the base 20 you basically have to take every year.
- We also have 10 public holidays. If you have to work on those, you get to recoup the day. Same goes for work on Sunday for most people, if Sunday work is even allowed in your sector.
- Sick days are normally not something you have to worry about as an employee, provided you have a doters note (which costs you 4€ for the visit). Although most places are starting to relax the note requirement for short (1-3 day) things. For short sick leave, you'll get 100% of your wage from your employer. Once it becomes a long term thing, you fall back on the health care system, which usually covers 70% of your wage. Some employers contribute the other 30%.
- Health care wise: We pay contributions via our wages into a "mutuality" based system. There are a few choices (1 government run, the rest are non profits) that offer different benefits, but the base coverage is mostly the same. Enrollment in this system is mandatory. More and more employers offer supplementary healthcare that can have benefits like full reimbursement of brand medicine instead of only the cost of generics, getting private rooms during hospitalizations for free, additional dental coverage, a new pair of glasses every year, ...
Note that this is all assuming you are an employee, not self-employed. There are also some legal differences between blue- and white-collar workers, but are slowly being removed over time.
I think I understand the rationale behind this. Basically people should take some rest every now and then. Personally, I consider this a violation of my freedom to work however I like. I like to work and usually I take just a few days off per year so I can, for example, visit the dentist without being stressed out to miss a work-related meeting. 20 days is basically an entire month of work. So people there work only 11/12 per year.
I see it more as protecting the employee from exploitation.
I can only think of Spotify.
Would love to be enlightened otherwise.
We can also expand the previous list of companies with HelloFresh, TrustPilot, Bolt, Brainly, Shazam
Also, if we think in term of people instead of companies, many big tech companies have offices in Europe or buy European companies. They employ European people with tech skills and productivity that seem good enough for those tech companies. So we can say that European people also make products that the average person uses often, even though their company is not labeled as European.
Mostly I think that scientific education level is an important factor for jobs in tech companies, and Europe seems to be ok in this area.
If you buy a Western-designed device with microcontrollers in it, they are often made by STMicroelectronics, NXP or Infineon, all European Silicon companies. They are all in the pockets of random people in smartphone form or in their laptops and PCs.
Klarna and Wise are widely used European payment processors. Your car's entertainment system is probably built with Qt which is Finnish. If you used Miro for Kanban stuff you used Dutch software.
Solidworks probably was used to draw most of the devices you use daily, it is French. Your electric car is probably designed in Siemens NX and they made the plug charger for it as well.
Catia, another Dassault 3D CAD platform that predates Solidworks, is French.
* Ericsson (Swedish) communications, including 5G equipment.
* ARM (UK) processors.
OK these are used by non-so-average people:
* Python (Dutch) programming language. DuckDB (Dutch). Polars (Dutch).
Seems to get quite a lot use each day.
Many products from Europe are not as visible or in face, but they are there.
In this light, how do you classify the products of companies like Google, Amazon or even Intel that have significant number of people working in Europe?
Although I do feel like having a life outside of work is more important than trying to boost how fast the number goes up which is stored in the field labelled "total assets", so Europe is better.
At the turn of the century I had a special international phone plan, but now I just Slack and Zoom, even via mobile tether.
Versus... just live with a good work/life balance in the EU in the first place?
The sacrifice is to secure enough assets to move up in levels of “security” (such as security of being able to procure medical/legal/education/land/other services that are beyond most wage earner’s capacity.
Although, it is also a perfectly reasonable move to not gamble on that and instead spend time with your family or friends or whatnot. Just depends what an individual wants to bet on.
I’m just not built for a 9-5 (or seemingly structured work for that matter). I do enjoy what I’m doing, but I can’t wait to sleep in every day and be spontaneous about my plans.
I went on sabbatical for half a year a while back, and it changed me. I can’t wait to get back in that frame of mind. I’ll probably pick up some work/hobbies for fun, but I don’t like work to dictate my life. I’m working towards every day being a mini vacation.
My work/life balance is also already very good, but it would be a lot better IMO if I could take off randomly for a month and fill my time with whatever suits me at that moment.
And a lot of Americans who speak my nothing but good will about European healthcare iconveniently leave out this truth.
Another inconvenient fact that is that most wealthy workers have suplemental private health insurance as well.
I'm intrigued by this idea, but how much I'd enough, or at least enough that I could work lightly and be in great shape?
Uk, you're looking at 50-60k GBP in a 2nd or 3rd tier city. London you'll want a bankers salary plus if you want to live in zone 1/2.
EU same applies. Around 50-60k EUR. The worst part about Europe and the UK are the lack of 30 year mortgages. Tier 1 cities you'll need way more.
Do you like having a higher quality of life, cool walkable cities, exotic med vacation spots that are honestly better than the carribbean, and several different cultures and languages 1 to 3 hours way? Then move to Europe.
Don't get me wrong, I've lived in Europe and it's very nice but I would rather make lots of money in America. European countries have a different set of problems that offset the many benefits they have.
My European friends have asked me how much I make and they've all consistently say I make as much money as a veteran senior executive.