5000€ is $5623. You can maintain a "normal" life standard around here for about $800 (renting a studio / two room flat in the city centre + all the expenses, no car but I never needed one - the subway takes me to the furthest parts of town in 25 minutes, walking to work is not unusual). So you're saving more or less 5000$ every month.
How much do you have to earn in SV to rent a place for your own next to your office and still save 5 grand a month? :)
Anyway I get your point and in general yeah, US salaries are of course on a whole new level and I won't even argue with that.
I'm not trying to say Warsaw is better for programmers than SV because it never was and never will be - yet we still managed, within last 5 years or so, managed to do something you somehow can't do - we trained HRs, agencies, recruiters etc. And they willingly act as we please. Because there's an incredibly high demand for programmers and no one has time for games like US companies play. And I still can't wrap my mind around this - if company Y or X is so desperately seeking for employees and pays them bazillions of dollars - why they even consider burning so much time on the process of hiring? Hiring is hard, I get that, but it's much easier if you disclose the salary. And in Poland right now hiring is impossible if the salary is unknown. And it's not even required by law (though it is supposed to be).
It's a leverage thing. Companies in high cost of living locations can just wait for someone else and they will. That doesn't work in a low cost of living locations, since their isn't much urgency from the perspective of the applicant.
After 10 years of experience, you are looking into buying a house. Granted, the price of the house is exhorbitant compared to its size, but that's the market.
The salaries are also low in my opinion. At just under 4 years experience I'm making 225k yearly in TC, over 170k of that is salary.
A potential cause for this effect might be that widespread bargaining reduces a market's efficiency, since prices are less transparent for buyers and sellers.
If you want a nice 1BR apartment ($3000) + a very generous budget for monthly expenses ($3000), you need to earn $11000 after tax to save 5 grand a month - i.e $132k a year.
A total compensation of $200k as a single person gets you that much after tax: https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-tax-calculator#BKf2k...
Take a look at these sources to see what top companies are paying software engineers in SV (spoiler: it's more than 200k, and you can add ~60% of each dollar above that to your savings): https://www.levels.fyi/ https://www.paysa.com/salaries
(How to use asterisks here?)
This is all gross, pre-deduction salary; not salary net of taxes, deductions, etc.
There is a Unicode small asterisk: ﹡
And some other variations: ∗ ＊
If you surround an asterisk by spaces it works fine: a * b * c * d
[1] https://www.mlaglobal.com/en/knowledge-library/research/2018...
According to Numbeo living in SF is about 2 (groceries) to 5 (rent) times more expensive compared to Warsaw: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
A 7 weeks holiday allowance has more than a monetary allowance.
The (many) issues with US health care do not affect upper/middle class professionals.
From a "patient perspective", as long as you are employed as a software engineer in SV, health care is not a concern at all (insurance is covered by the employer). If anything, it is superior to anything I experienced in Europe.
The issue in America is essentially that the system is paid by piecework. So the entire system optimises for the number of tests/procedures/operations etc. that can be performed. And that might not be so bad in and of itself, if 21st century medicine was reliable. But it's not, and the sad truth of the US system is that many of the (very expensive) procedures it performs have worst outcomes than leaving the patient alone.
In the Netherlands, a patient should not expect from a doctor to conduct any tests at all. I had no experience with the Dutch healthcare myself, but I've heard horrendous stories about it, for example how Irish expat went to a doctor with a problem of pain while swallowing, received nothing more than an advice "well, swallow less, then" (like in a bad joke about doctors), went home to Ireland a got diagnosed with a throat cancer there.
So your $5K after taxes wouldn't even register on my radar.