I'm in the Boston market and median salary for devs is around 80-90k when you include all skill levels, but every single dev I know has roommates or an hour+ commute into the city and higher healthcare costs than Germany.

I'd believe that you would make more overall money in the US once you got to the higher end of the market, but it's not as simple as a calculation as you are making it out to be

There are many perks to Berlin over SF, but salaries and net income are not it.

Im just emphasizing that the fact that europe has benefits, it does not necessarily (or likely) outweigh the difference in salary from one to the other. You are certainly taxed more by a lower wage and by a higher tax rate that could compensate ubering every day and private schooling.

They should probably look for housing near a commuter rail then

If nothing else it's much more pleasant, anyway.

Your priorities, of course, may be different.

I live in a country where you have to pay insurmountable amounts of money to fire employees. The salaries that us pays are about 8x. Gimme at will employment.

> I would definitely take the 60K if it includes awesome public transport, unemployment money, affordable healthcare, a month of holidays, and having free time in the evenings for hobbies.

I had plenty of free time in SF to do whatever i wanted when I worked there. Maybe i was lucky, but i did not find work-life balance to be particularly out of whack. Europe is more relaxed, but also less ambitious in terms of culture. That can be frustrating as well.

> I would definitely take the 60K if it includes awesome public transport, unemployment money, affordable healthcare, a month of holidays, and having free time in the evenings for hobbies.

You are paying for all those things, its not like they are free in europe. You can also pay for them in the US on software engineer salaries. Google has ample pto, facebook has parental rights, etc. You can always take unpaid time off, something easier to do in the US than in other countries.

Adding restrictions on employer's ability to fire makes employers far less likely to hire. It enriches the already employed at the expense of the unemployed. If anything it makes more sense to have at-will employment in countries with strong social safety nets because unemployment is less disruptive there.

Getting new hires up to speed is expensive enough that they'd be pretty stupid to actually do this. Sure a few do, but it isn't common.

Also, a couple minutes with google turns up this: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=AVD_DUR . If it says what I think it says, getting a new job really is easier in the US (like it should be, because as any economist will tell you this is what has to happen when a bad hire is less of a disaster for the employer).

I think it boils down to whether you want to take care of yourself, or if you let the state do it for you.

In part, yes.

But also, there are two approaches to reducing downtime. You can increase MTBF (make things more reliable, make it harder to get fired); or you can reduce MTTR (make things easier to fix, make it easier to get hired somewhere new). Europe goes with the first approach, the US goes with the second (which I very much prefer, because it doesn't gum things up).

Separately, there's also making downtime less of a problem (failover systems, all the various other social safety net things). The US is generally known to kinda suck at this.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity

I believe the point they were making is simply that they can. You're not protected (aside from the small handful of reason that actually are protected).

Google and other tech companies in the U.S having nice offices doesn't mean the work life balance of Googlers is something to envy. Probably the opposite actually (three meals a day makes you stay there for dinner, nap rooms to let you stay even later). Not a great work life balance.

Source: know Googlers, have been to Google offices

I think Silicon Valley megacorps are exceptional outliers. Obviously people can make silly money at Google, but so do athletes in the largest leagues. It's just not a useful comparison between continents with millions of employees. Exclude the top 10% and bottom 10% makes for a more reasonable comparison.

Higher costs, lower stability, and no safety net... I think that I would prefer that Berlin salary (and I'm a US resident).

[0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

Housing is the main difference: you can get a fairly large place in berlin, and you can have a family there. But SF is one city, there are pleny of other cities in the us more family friendly (if not any other city).

I remember recently a map showing the purchasing power by salary per state, and the biggest purchasing power was nebraska.

That said, speaking as a New Zealander: don't come here. There are no jobs, and if you find one, you will be underpaid. If you're looking for the weather and standard-of-living combination offered by the southern hemisphere, consider Melbourne or Sydney instead. Very few of my graduating class at the University of Auckland will end up remaining in the city, I suspect.

I just heard NZ was doing a state sponsored world-wide call for workers. Is it because people are leaving? Where are they leaving to?

If people leave, normally they leave for Australia (because it's very easy to do so).

While Berlin is a great city, it is very far from being a top-pay city in Europe.

Office are part of work, not part of life

Moving back to Berlin, I went part time because it was sufficient.