In pretty much all of the EU, even in expensive cities like Stockholm or Dublin, if you earn a salary of €100,000, you can live a pretty decent life. Heck even on €50,000, you can do well in a lot of places.
Good luck doing the same in any of the top 10 most expensive cities in the US.
Define "decent".
In the top tier cities in western EU countries, buying even a modest apartment that will house a small family will be a challenge on €100k (pre-tax!). It is certainly doable, but you will not be able to afford any other luxuries.
I would consider Paris a top-tier city, and while none of my friends make more than 100k, half of us bought our house already (we're all late 20s, early 30s, with a few kids starting to pop-up).
If you make 80k€[1] pre-tax in Paris (that's a good salary for SWE here), you can borrow more than 300k€. For a couple, that means buying a 700k€ flat/house, you can even live in the middle of Paris for that price! And we're talking about one of the most expensive city in Europe, with a massive housing bubble since 2000 (where the price was 2.74 times lower, adjusted for the evolution of salaries[2]).
In Europe, you are affluent with less than 100k€.
[1]: I'm talking about «super brut», which is how much money you cost to your employer, not the «brut» which appears on your working contract (which would be around 57k€ in this example)
[2] https://stymaar.fr/net/Capture%20du%202021-01-14%2012-11-55...., source Jacques Friggit (http://www.cgedd.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/prix-immobili...)
And it's not only Google.
100k will also not put you in the 1% of the earners if you consider the cities where the high paying jobs are.
In any case, the point is that with €100k/year you can really have way more than a decent life. More like a very, very comfortable life.
These salaries are also possible in Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Mannheim, Heidelberg (and more, this is where I know)
> In any case, the point is that with €100k/year you can really have way more than a decent life. More like a very, very comfortable life.
Well so what? They shouldnt pay more because it is already a decent salary and give the rest to the share holders?
It's no wonder that avarage salaries are low if people approach salary negotiations with this kind of attitude.
It's funny, because my father in law (French, but who spent quite some times living in the US) often says the opposite: “Americans don't value property ownership. That's because they have wooden houses that last for a few decades and get replaced, while in Europe we buy stone that last for centuries”.
Clichés are clichés.
UK is in Europe btw ;)
It's not required to own, sure, but it increases your comfort level significantly.
This list would suggest that there are many countries in Europe with a higher home ownership rate than the US, the UK or Australia. Surely that says something about valuing it.
If you want to raise a family in SF proper, I agree that 100k/yr total income would be insufficient for what most people consider a reasonable QoL, even if one spouse stayed at home to take care of the children to avoid childcare costs.
Of course, in SF, 100k/yr is "entry-level engineer at an early stage startup" territory in terms of earnings, which is not the typical profile of someone trying to raise children. You'd have to be trying really hard to not make double that as a mid-level engineer in the Bay, though.
Keep in mind that even once you get past the flashy comp numbers at FAANG, there are a huge number of publicly-traded tech companies in the Bay which pay enough that you could afford a mortgage to buy a house in SF on a single engineer's earnings without breaking 35% of post-tax take home pay. (A bit of a stretch at 200k, easy at 250k.) Even startups are getting there: a friend of mine recently got a new job in the Bay (not in SF, but close) paying over 200k in cash comp (base + bonus) with less than 5 years of experience, plus some options (which are probably not worthless, but can't immediately be used to pay a mortgage). He's a good engineer but this isn't an unusual outcome; some of the engineers I know aren't as good, but they make more money because they took the interview grind seriously and went for companies with publicly-traded stock.