Well...factor in health insurance and other government benefits.

The part often left out of the discussion of how much better government benefits are in UK/Europe, is how much higher salaries are in the US.

These types of jobs come with the best health insurance.

I'd be surprised if most people at microsoft paid more than $100 a year in health expenses.

Microsoft, just like everyone else, has a High Deductible plan. As American healthcare plans go, it's fine, but if you need to go to the doctor at all expect the first few thousand to come directly out of your pocket/Health Savings Account.

Conversely, they contribute a certain amount to HSA every year. So, depending on how much one needs, it's quite possible for none of it to have come out of your pocket.

Google and Microsoft both give you $1000 in your HSA to offset that. If you don't use it, you get to keep it. Deducitbles are $1400 now, so still you pay max $400 + 10% of how much you go over till $2800. So around $540. Which isn't bad at all.

Conversely the employer and employee national insurance contributions for my salary are over £22,000.

What is that the converse of? Parent post was talking about deductibles, not premiums.

Premiums are about $12K for singles and $25K for families.

FANG aside, Americans make more than any other country in the OECD on median, after adjusting for healthcare and education benefits and government transfers.

https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm

Your deductibles and HSA contributions will be lower than my National Insurance contributions yet alone the employer ones and considerably so.

As a “high” (by UK standards not US ones) income earner in the UK the “cost” of your health insurance/benefits would be considerably higher than the cost in the US but the benefits won’t be dependent on your continued employment.

The reality is that the compensation in the UK/EU is overall rather pitiful especially when you account for the higher taxation and the employment costs to the employer are much higher which is one of the main reasons for the lower salaries rather than the employers don’t need to cover benefits.

For a taxable salary of £115K which is on the higher end of what you can get in the U.K. these days the employer NIC is £13,885 that’s 10% contribution on top of the salary alone the employee is then pays over £6000 in contributions also.

Or get a job with one of the FAANG companies in the UK? (e.g. both Google and Facebook have engineering offices there)

Even so, they adjust for cost of living (edit: and local market rate). Salaries in the US are just higher than in Europe. I think Switzerland is the only exception.

It's not cost of living, it's the market rate. London has a high cost of living but salaries are lower.

It's only the market rate in London because they ignore the existence of finance, which is where you can make serious money in London.

They don't "ignore" anything. The market is what's relevant to them . SWE salaries and not banking salaries. SWE salaries in finance would be even worse in London.

And that's why they have such great retention in London, and nobody ever moves to the US for better money?

I mean, they normally aim to pay 90th percentile for the market, and that is definitely not true for London.

This is very efficient and is calibrated every year. It makes no sense to account for salaries in fields that don't compete. If someone wants to be paid higher they could happily move to the US. The algorithm accounts for all of this.

I'm glad you think so. Having worked with a megacorp that took this approach, the primary reason I'm not still with them is that all the decent jobs in tech were in London, and moving there would have required me to take a relative paycut (the wages were the same but the CoL was much higher).

However, I did get a lot of offers at much less profitable companies for much, much better salaries based in London, hence why I'm pointing out this problem.

I mean, if you're fine with only hiring grads/relatively junior developers then the system works. I'm just observing that it didn't work for me, and for a lot of people I knew back it the days.

(The constant re-staffing of teams with new people after key members moved to the US was also maddening).

Yeah, you're probably right.

Rephrasing: the market rate in Europe is lower than in the US. Between 1.5 - 2 - much, much more.