I’m Danish, but it’s like this in all of Scandinavia. Most of Western Europe offer great benefits though. That’s part of Macrons problem in France, because they haven’t managed to reform their institutions and it’s really hard to have a functional economy when everyone is off on paid leave. ;p

The pay is also for actual engineers with a candidate degree. It’s around $40000-$50000 + a 15% pension if your education is only academy or bachelor level.

"I’m Danish, but it’s like this in all of Scandinavia"

Here in Finland the figure you referred (86k$) would be equivalent to director level pay in the public side. An engineer with the package you described would be above average in compensation here. We get 4 to 6 weeks of paid vacation.

The average wage in software engineering here is around 40k$ - 57k$ (i.e more or less what you referred). In software engineering, depending on the employer, the degree does not necessarily affect compensation though. Top of the line engineers are well compensated (in the Finnish scale) regardless of their degree.

Of course, Finland is not strictly geographically speaking part of Scandinavia (although it is a nordic country) :)

I wasn’t counting Finland, but that was rude of me and I apologize. Finland is certainly part of Scandinavia!

Norway and Sweden are the same.

In fact most people I know in Denmark don’t break the €55k (converted from DKK) salary, experience also has very little effect on your salary so you aren’t going to double or more your salary over the life time of your career.

You also forget to mention the tax rate you pay.