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Comment by poisonborz | Hacker News Reader

This misunderstanding about EU/US salaries is so baffling to me, how this opinion can come up still in every EU conversation. Do people really just look at $$$ without a second of thought of how governments/taxation works and what they get for that salary/taxes?

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People end up thinking this, but they're just looking at tech roles. However, the difference becomes clear when you compare other jobs. In tech, the US pays way more than Europe, for other jobs, they don't. Take teachers, for example:

- Median Salary in USA: $~58k [1]

- Median Salary in Berlin: 35k EUR [2]

So while there is a difference, it is by far not as huge a gap as in tech where Europe pays ~60-70k (very and some countries, e.g. Spain or Portugal way less) and in the US 200k-300k are not unusual.

The difference is that US companies understand the huge value creation potential of tech jobs (especially over the past 2 decades) whereas most european companies think value creation comes from having middle aged balding managers.

[1]: https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-scho... [2]: https://worldsalaries.com/average-teacher-salary-in-berlin/g...

It is unclear to me if that salary includes pension, employer taxes, etc. Comparing raw values also does not put job value into view: you cannot be fired on the spot. Healthcare cost almost nothing compared to the US due to some of those taxes. You can have sick-leave thay is paid for multiple years or parental leave for a year (in Germany). All of that while your employer keeps paying. This pushes salary down as risk for employers goes up, but life quality and happiness can also increase across the workforce.

All-in-all super hard to compare salaries, even though having a 200k salary in the Netherlands I would not say no to of course

There are 44 countries in Europe. What makes you think that your experience of getting the most of your government/taxation whatever you want to call it matches the experience of any other European country government/system?

If you do a comparison of EU/US I guess everyone naturally thinks of something like San Francisco/Berlin and not Bucharest.

The base logic does match though. The execution is very country-dependent.

Then please correct your comment into Berlin/SF rather than EU/US. Otherwise it sounds like you're talking uninformed nonsense.

The gap is _huge_ and goes way beyond having different government taxation.

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