You'll have all of those things at the companies listed in this PDF with the exclusion of protected employment. I'm fine with that.

You don't have all of this, first of all if you stop working you're screwed right? Like somehow you lost your job and you have something serious happening, good luck with hospital bill.

I've never seen someone starting at FANG with 5 weeks vacation right away. Lot of of European countries have 5/7weeks when they start working.

Correct, you won't have 5 weeks of vacation right away at all of those companies. You will have 5 weeks of vacation quickly.

You're not screwed if you stop working. You have both long term and short term disability. If you just decide that you'd like to live on a beach or under a bridge, and there isn't an actual problem, ie you choose to be lazy, then yeah, good luck with that.

Personally I don't want my tax dollars helping people who just decide to not work, but that's just me. The government mismanages enough things in the US as it is.

I am personally willing to let a small percentage of people decide not to work (e.g. lazy) if it means a safety net for a much larger group of people who have a legitimate need for that safety net.

What percentage? Who gets to decide who gets to opt out of working for a living? Who grants the final approval?!

It'd be fraud/abuse, and I'd expect it to be prosecuted, so nobody "gets" to opt out, but refusing to help many people because a handful could potentially abuse the system is not something I'm willing to do.

I should have explained a bit more, but if you have a serious health issue and you can't work anymore for sometime how does it works with hospital bill? If you stop working for 6month for example are you still covered?

With the exception of one small company I worked for, every employer has offered both short-term and long-term disability at no cost to employees. You're still covered by the employer's health insurance during that period.

> first of all if you stop working you're screwed right? Like somehow you lost your job and you have something serious happening, good luck with hospital bill.

I was unemployed for a bit due to family issues. I switched to COBRA which let me stay on employers insurance. It was expensive but I am sure its not a big deal for software engineers mentioned in the document. Then I got onto to obamacare via job loss exception. So yea I never screwed so to speak.

This is true, but these benefits are not necessarily exactly as good as they look on paper.

For example, I work in London, and I routinely have to resort to private medical healthcare because wait times at my borough NHS clinic can be 2-3 weeks, even before COVID-19 hit. In one serious incident, I was not able to be seen at either a local GP or a local 'walk-in' emergency room due to standard winter capacity issues, and so had to shell out 250 quid to see a private GP, who didn't even have the equipment to suture me up, so my friend, who works as an NHS GP, did it for me in his apartment. Dental coverage is extremely limited here too, although it does cover basic cleaning/checkup services (so it's better than Canada in that regard).

As for days PTO - sure, but it's going to depend again on the company. You may or may not be able to actually take that PTO at fear of reprisal (indirectly or directly). At least on paper they can't stop you from doing it I guess. Fair point on the maternity as far as I can tell.

At the end of the day, would I trade the above benefits (with the exception of maternity leave) for 200k USD per year? Uh - yeah, for sure.

In Germany it is common to wait many months for certain medical services. For example I have to wait 4 months for a x-ray examination... Many services are not available at all if you have government insurance.

Several states, including California, Rhode Island and I think now New Jersey have paid maternity/paternity leave.

The engineers working at these companies in the slides get all of that too, except the not at-will employment. But even if they didn't, the entry-level engineer could pay for all of that and still have way more money left than most any SWE in Europe, regardless of seniority. And that money probably gets them better health care than most Europeans, too.

If you're pulling a gigantic salary at one of these companies, you almost certainly have healthcare, generous PTO, and generous maternity offerings as part of the package too.

It's not really that different for most of these companies. They'll typically have good health insurance either fully-paid or heavily subsidized, probably at least 15 days PTO, often paternal leave, etc.

Just to preface this: I’m actually not disagreeing with you.

The issue with the above is that the top software engineers earn less than they could otherwise. Thus, the very top engineers will always be looking to move to the United States. This kind of decapitates the European tech ecosystem. It’s actually one of my theories for why we see the very different tech ecosystems in America and the EU.