I have a very high quality of life here, strong protections as a permanent employee (increasingly less common in other industries in Germany, but not in tech!), a salary that is excellent compared to many of my peers, and comes with a purchasing power that I imagine meets or exceeds someone in my same position in New York or the Bay Area.
I won't pretend there aren't downsides (for example, stock as compensation is rare here, and not incentivised by the legal situation), but for me the upsides win over raw actuarial comparisons. I'd much rather have my compensation in Berlin than trade it for 2x or even 4x that in the US.
(Edit to add: once you bring rent, medical insurance and associated out-of-pocket costs, and paid time off into the picture, compensation in the US starts to look like a pretty raw deal IMO.)
On a purely subjective note: American work culture has lower trust and attempts to extract much more "productivity" from people doing the work compared to European companies, which is not always proportional to the salary differences. My sample size is fairly small (<5)
That seems very unlikely. Housing is expensive in most of the major metropolitan areas in the US, but you more than make up for it with higher salaries.
The rest of your argument makes perfectly good sense, there's lots to love about living and working in Europe! It may well be worth it to you.
But it's disingenuous to mix those quality of life arguments with an argument about money. Tech workers in the US tech hubs live a financially/materially more comfortable life than those in Europe.
Genuinely don't understand why you would see these as disconnected from each other.
> Tech workers in the US tech hubs live a financially/materially more comfortable life than those in Europe.
Obviously as you can see from my comment above, I disagree with this view.
The same salary in US could be viewed as 'you are rich' or 'you can't pay rent' depending on with city you live in. Now, you are talking about different continents.
I would compare the possible lifestyles and quality of life: how long does it take to buy a house/apartment? Can you afford to travel on vacation? Can you save money for your kids' college (or do you even need to do that)?
That said, with the rise of big tech satellite offices and remote work, there is definitely a path to €150k+ total comp without leaving the EU, and over time this should put upward pressure on salaries across the board (London is ahead of the curve here).
A soulcycle class is $35/pop. Even at one a day, on top of $4000/month for rent, and income tax, you're still left with roughly the amount a mid level engineer in a european city (excluding maybe London) makes pre-tax. No amount of Avocado toast, or whatever the sneaker fad changes that equation.
> However if you still buy the house in SF with that savings you tend to again lose all benefit.
That's no different to buying a house in London or Amsterdam say, except once you've dumped $1m into your "modest" home, you're still earning 2.5x what the person in London/Amsterdam is.
"You can't make rent"/"You can't buy a house with a reasonable commute" an a software dev salary is almost entirely a California and NYC-area phenomenon.
A "typical" software developer (even a junior) could afford a decent house within a reasonable commute in ~7 of the top 10 metro areas in the US (Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, Atlanta). In the remaining 3 (NYC, LA, DC), you'd probably end up with an unpleasantly long commute, although plenty of people make that choice. If you go further down the list of metros, the ratio is similar.
> How long does it take to buy a house/apartment?
In any of the metro areas mentioned above, you should be able to buy a house on a software dev salary as soon as you've save a 5-10% down payment (so $25-50k for a $500k house, more if you want something bigger/in a nicer area). The difference in salaries vs. Europe would typically allow you to save that within a couple years.
> Can you afford to travel on vacation?
Unambiguous yes - you can afford the monetary cost of a vacation on a software dev salary. Families in much less lucrative fields than software still take vacations.
Paid time off is trickier - European norms are for employers to provide much higher amounts of PTO for all employees, while most American firms are much stingier with it. This is something to explicitly shop around for and use as a decision criteria in a job hunt. There are definitely large American firms that provide 20-25 PTO days standard for new employees.
> Can you save money for your kids' college (or do you even need to do that)?
Annual tuition & mandatory fees at the flagship state university in the median state is ~$12k, so ~$48k for a 4-year degree. This excludes living costs, but you have to pay living costs at European universities as well. If returns on your college investments keep pace with tuition increases (many states have programs that can explicitly guarantee this), then you can pay tuition after 18 years by saving $2700/year per child.
You didn't mention healthcare, which often comes up, but software devs working as full-time employees will typically have good health insurance available through work, so that's not a problem in practice either.
There are tons of reasons to prefer Europe vs. the US (culture, a preference for dense living, lower-pressure work environments, more paid time off, etc.) but overall buying power isn't really one of them. Your salary will buy you more "stuff" (housing, cars, vacations, savings, etc.) in the US, unless you choose to live in one of the highest-cost regions of the country without a correspondingly high salary.
Yeah, you have to buy the perks that are free (because your taxes go toward useful things) in the EU, but you make so much more money, that buying them is easy.
The US is a really strange place. It's far worse for 90% of people than the EU, but for the top 5% or so, it's unimaginably better.
2) Your kids won't get shot in the school.
3) You don't have to drive 20 minutes to the closest store to buy bread and milk.
4) I have 35d of paid vacation, while AFAICT in US you're lucky if you get 20. I'd get a brain melt or die from overworking if I had any less vacation days than now.
I've never been to US so I overly generalize and cherrypick based on what I've read, but I think what I wrote above will ring bell to many others.
Apart from that, other issues like: being close to family etc.
I could imagine going to US for a few years and get $$$ and get back, but overall, US does not seem to me like an American dream from the 90s anymore.
2) An average of three children die per year in school shootings, giving odds of roughly 1 in 800,000 (hard to tell with such tiny sample sizes). Your child is more likely to be struck by lightning and far more likely to die in a fire or car accident. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/11/lockdown-...
3) That is just not true unless you live in a rural area. I don't know where you get that from. Denser cities have groceries often within walking distance, and most suburbs will have plenty of grocery stores within a 5-10 minute drive.
4) Unlimited PTO is extremely common for tech companies in the US. It's not uncommon for me to see people taking 7+ weeks.
There are issues in the US of course, but I really would not completely trust low-effort media narratives. There's a reason people come here.
About the shootings, yes, media coverage is skewing things a lot. I live in France and my friends abroad think there's an islamic terrorist attack happening here every week.
Anyway, the US society feels way more class-divided. Even if as an employee of FAANG I would get a good health insurance, the way the system works overall for average folk just doesn't make me feel like living in such a system. (What if I lose a job for whatever reason? No fancy insurance anymore!). And as someone with a "preexisting condition" I'm actually not sure how my case would be treated in case I wanted to apply for a visa.
2. There is a long long long distance between the average case and the worst case that you are describing, especially for engineers. Sharing a room with 3 people or living in a van is very very very far from the average case. Pretty much no engineer needs to do this. If they are, they are doing it to save to the max or doing something very wrong.
3. Same with health insurance. You don't need FAANG for good health insurance. 92% of people have health insurance. Granted, that is of varying quality but being uninsured is far from the average case.
My sense of the US vs. western Europe is that the US is quite a bit worse if you are in the bottom 30%, slightly better in the average case, and much better for the top 20%. And engineers easily make it into the top 20%. So perhaps the peace of mind is worth it since rock bottom is so awful in the US. But there still is a big difference between average and worst case, and the media hyper focuses on the worst case.
Re: housing + medical costs, yep, the quick math says that unless things go really terribly wrong, in a few years one should build up a substantial safety net despite the costs.
For young and healthy (new graduates etc.) it definitely makes sense to go to US for a few years (and then perhaps come back as a remote person in Europe and start a small EU office, I know that's how many EU offices of US second-tier (non-FAANG) big techs have started).
Rent in SF-NY is high, but it's not that high. It's far less than the extra money that you make. $3k/month will get you a nice apartment just for yourself, no roommates. $4k/month will get you something awesome.
On $150k/year, which is what my students make as their entry-level salaries at Google and friends, you can buy an apartment in almost every metro area in the US so that you don't even need a car. As a mid career developer you can easily afford a house even in SF-NY. I don't even have a driver's license...
> Even if as an employee of FAANG I would get a good health insurance, the way the system works overall for average folk just doesn't make me feel like living in such a system.
That's the thing. The US works for the people in the top 5% and is pretty bad for the people in the bottom 90%.
> And as someone with a "preexisting condition" I'm actually not sure how my case would be treated in case I wanted to apply for a visa.
Visas don't have healthcare checks. You'll be fine.
I’m pro-US and SF/NY as anyone but this isn’t accurate. If you want a house comparable to one you’d get in a MCOL city like Sacramento/Portland (3-4 bd, 1800+ sqft, good schools), you’re going to be forking over $2m+. That’s not very easy to achieve even for SF engineers. You need to be staff at FAANG or similar and preferably with a high earning partner (lawyer, doctor, executive, etc). Otherwise you’re gonna be house poor.
I still agree US is generally very good for engineers, especially ones in SF/NY/Seattle. But let’s not fool people with saying real estate is also very affordable...
AFAIK, SaaS companies aren't charging demonstrably less for their applications in the EU than they are in the US. So the ratio from development to commercial value in the EU is significantly higher.
In other words, management/founders/investments/equity holders should be far more profitable in the EU and its to the detriment of the individual engineer. Income inequality is therefore in theory more exacerbated.
Is Canada that much better though? I briefly considered it but I determined that the high rents and not so high wages would not be worth it for a move.
> Well, seniors can make like 70-80k€ where I live, which is like the 3rd percentile in my country. Still true though, the salaries are not great compared to the US.
That also means you have no room for growth. In the US 200k/year would put you in the 10th percentile for household income. You have plenty of room to build up from there. The thing about the EU is that not only are salaries low, the ceiling is also low.
To be fair the gap between senior developer and entry level salaries is pretty big here. Entry level salaries might around 30k (which is close to the median overall full time salary here if you live in the capital).
Dev salaries are astounding. Senior engineers in the EU make less than entry level undergrads in the US or Canada. 60k Euros is 70k USD. People out of bootcamps with zero experience make more than that in the US. I don't have a single friend from university that I remember making less than 100k upon graduation. Mid-career salaries with bonuses and stock are 200k+.
I'm afraid that until things radically change in the EU we'll always have US tech giants. Living in the EU isn't worth a 4x pay cut for many people.