> Eh the salaries are alright. It seems to me like the salaries are higher in America, while in Germany they're lower but include things American end up paying for: pensions, insurance, and education.

While that's true, above-average earners like engineers/doctors/laywers definitely come on top in the US. Also for most of these people health insurance is paid for by the company.

The trade-off is for everyone else basically, who get a much shittier deal in the US compared to what they would get in any EU country.

I'd still consider quality of life because of vacations, sick days and parental leave.

Skilled US jobs pay more, no matter how you look at it. I'm just thinking that above a certain income level, other perks become a lot more valuable.

I have nearly unlimited free time now, and you'd have to drag me back kicking and screaming to an office. Even if you doubled my salary, I wouldn't go back to 2-3 weeks of vacation like my parents back in Canada. The extra 3 weeks I got when I moved to Germany were life-changing.

There's are also finer points about the differences in work culture, but that's not really a guarantee. There are plenty of overworked Germans, even if they're allegedly rarer.

It's really hard to compare what amounts to different values. It's just important to understand that total income isn't the only thing employees are chasing, especially if it involves relocating to a different continent.

Maybe I'm very lucky then, but I have:

- 400k salary

- 4 weeks of vacation + 12 holidays (low by EU standards but not by much)

- Free top tier health insurance for family

I agree 6 weeks is nice, but usually employers will let you take an extra week or two unpaid if you want the extra time.

Americans have a government-provided pension (Social Security) that pays about the same as the German one, paid for by employment taxes.

US employees also commonly have health insurance, typically covered by the employer in the tech field (or any median+ full-time job). Somehow foreign posters on HN constantly fail to recognize this fact. One would think after more than a decade of it commonly popping up here, the false narrative would stop (and it's corrected in every thread where it comes up).

It usually goes like this:

US tech salaries are great, but you have no health insurance. Or: yeah but you have to pay $12,000 per year for your own health insurance, so you have to deduct that to get a fair accounting on salaries.

When the reality is: if you work in tech you're likely receiving good health insurance coverage from your employer, and you're simultaneously paying lower taxes than in Germany.

Which is another way of saying that US salaries would be even further beyond peers if one takes an accurate accounting of the health insurance benefit + taxes.

Once you go through the effort of pointing all of this out, then they'll revert to: yeah but the quality of life is still superior so there. Having watched that forever process here across more than a decade, I've learned that people - even intelligent, seemingly knowledgeable people - often just shoehorn whatever lies or false narratives they need to feel good about their context when they lay their head on the pillow at night. And that's why no matter how many times it's corrected, the false narrative in question will never end.

> When the reality is: if you work in tech you're likely receiving good health insurance coverage from your employer, and you're simultaneously paying lower taxes than in Germany.

Just the fact that you need to add the "in tech" to me suggests that US system isn't that great. It's pretty good, assuming you're in tech. The other problem is that when you look at your W-2, you can see how much your employer pays for your health insurance - this is the amount that you should also treat like a tax, even if you do want to add it to the total comp (it's money your employer spends on you that you don't get to see). The fair way to compare wages & tax rates would be to look at the total cost of employing a person vs how much of that money this person actually gets. And even then there's VAT & sales tax that needs to be taken into account...

Are there any sites that attempt to do those kinds of analyses / comparisons?

> When the reality is: if you work in tech you're likely receiving good health insurance coverage from your employer, and you're simultaneously paying lower taxes than in Germany.

As long as you don't get fired and as long as you don't get sick. But yeah. If you are young, healthy and in tech you have good health insurance in the US. Congratulations.

So, maybe, when we foreigners talk about this aspect of the US healthcare system we understand completely how it works and just don't see it as equivalent.

Yet how many people, even well-educated ones, have this balanced view on salaries? Most people see the bottom line on their pay statements. They "conveniently" forget that they still have to pay for health insurance, pension funds, etc.

A big figure on the pay slip is a status symbol. If Germany wants to attract foreign high-profile human capital like the US does, they should create a similar system: Pay them their full salary without deductions, and then charge them the mandatory cost instead of their employers. It could work wonders.

You opine on a system you clearly don't understand.

Each of these deductions are clearly shown on your pay slips. They can be calculated in advance from your gross income.

In the end, the amounts you pay (reduced by half because of employer contributions) are relatively low.

In any case, it's impossible to have a balanced view on compensation, because of the huge differences between the countries you compare. I lived 6 years and Germany and the rest of my life in Canada. I still wouldn't venture to compare what a salary means in either country.

Maybe I wasn't being clear enough. What I meant was to simply hide the deductions on the pay slip. Or go one step further, do not deduct them from the salary at the time of payout, but just postpone them and deduct them from the receiver's bank account (and make the bank responsible for making sure he doesn't send the money to Switzerland before it happens).

So the employee sees the huge number being transferred into his account. He can go on the internet and brag about how great salaries in Germany are.

Also, you are wrong here: "Reduced by half because of employer contributions". This only applies to very specific insurances like private pension funds, where there's a split.

Costs for health care aren't split like that, the employer deducts the full amount.

But thanks for the patronising comment. American?

"In the end, the amounts you pay (reduced by half because of employer contributions) are relatively low."

I typed 100k/year into brutto-netto-rechner and it shows that Netto is less than 65k. Basically over 35% of your salary gets confiscated by the state, of course this doesn't include further taxes like 19% VAT you pay every time you buy anything at all.

How is that "relatively low"?

He's completely wrong, is why.

You are right except the german pensions they are a ponzi scheme and will fail in the future.

I hear this a lot about social security in the US as well, that it will fail. I would characterize it as degrading instead of failing. If the workforce declines there will be fewer payers into social security or pensions, then folks paying into social security will have to pay more, recipients will get fewer benefits, or the government will print money

It is not a "Ponzi scheme" at all, rubbish. The pension system is not an investment theme. Currently working people provide for current pensioners. No "investing" involved. That, in the light of a shift in age distribution, this works better when the economy and productivity grow is orthogonal, the pension system payments are not for economic growth but directly for current pensioners.

Unless you find aliens or a time machine to shift goods and also services through time, always and everywhere the currently working take care of the current pensioners. There is nothing "Ponzi" about it, that is the universe.

People who pay now do not pay for their future pension, they pay for the current pensioners. What is transmitted to the future - when they become pensioners - is not what they pay now, it is merely information. That information is then taken into account when the then living and working working people pay the pensions of the then pensioners. The information about how much somebody contributed in the past is taken into consideration to see how much a share of the overall pie everyone gets, but the pie itself always is created in the present by whoever works now.

Which also makes the headlines a little silly that claim that because in the future there will be more of an imbalance between nr. of people working and those getting a pension something needs to be changed now. It makes no sense: The current payments into the system immediately go to the current pensioners. If there are less paying and/or more receiving the funds that can and is always balanced at whatever the current time is. There is no need to do anything now when the current payments are enough to pay the current pensioners. If next year there is an imbalance they adjust what the payments (in and out) are at that time. It makes no sense to change payments now when the problem is not right now.

Any finance-based scheme cannot undo the universe (except, aliens helping out or time machine). "Private" funds change nothing of the underlaying truth that current pensioners live from what current workers produce in both goods an services. It only changes who is responsible: More winners and losers (and then "it's your own fault, why did you not buy stocks - the right stocks too of course") with the finance based system, with one huge winner the financial industry.

This applies to all public pension systems, not only the German one.

This also applies to private retirement investments. My comfort in retirement is contingent on the economy, and hence, the stock market, growing. If the 'ponzi scheme' of limitless growth collapses, I'm not going to be any better off than the pensioner.

I'm not sure that any public pension systems in any way satisfy the definition of a Ponzi scheme. While public pension systems may be flawed, in no way are they fraudulent or otherwise non-transparent at the very least in democratic regimes.