Nonsense. European families get healthcare for life.

eehh, no? Pretty sure I pay for mine every month (NL).

Legit question, don't EU have by law, very generous unemployment benefits compared to the US?

It depends on what you understand with very generous unemployment benefits. Te me just the fact that there is universal healthcare makes the unemployment benefits way better.

I am a EU citizen having lived in the US for almost a decade and I still can't overcome the stress of losing my job because of this.

With the higher salary in the US, especially as a software engineer, you could easily put a little bit aside to pay for a healthcare exchange plan for a while if you do ever lose your job.

The scale of benefits generally looks like:

Average US worker << Average EU worker < US Big Tech Worker

I wonder where EU tech workers (big or not) fit in this. Certainly pay is less than US, but when I worked in Europe, everyone took all of their vacation time and generally did not work beyond regular business hours. Where I work today in the US, even junior devs (i.e. no on-call or general need to fight fires outside of regular hours) are grinding away on nights and weekends. The only way I can basically take a half-day here and there during the week to ski is because my team would be screwed without me, but it's still a pressure cooker compared to my last job in Europe; "I'm going to be bikepacking in Sweden all of August and won't be reachable" -> guess which OOO notice that job came from? xD

> Where I work today in the US, even junior devs (i.e. no on-call or general need to fight fires outside of regular hours) are grinding away on nights and weekends.

Wow. Most places are not like that. Get out of there.

> The only way I can basically take a half-day here and there during the week to ski is because my team would be screwed without me

lol. No. Your team will do just fine if you dropped dead today. Trust m. Teams are always fine.

Take the time off and get down off the cross.

It's amazing how prevalent this type of attitude is and not only in tech but in like menial jobs I've had when I was young as well. People actually think they are Atlas, supporting the entire operation and without them it would collapse. It's just not true, ever. It doesn't mean people aren't valued and that the organization is better off with them, but just because an individual can't see an organization working without them doesn't mean they can't.

We don't say it out loud because it's not polite but everyone is replaceable. In fact, there's many things we don't say because we are polite but I sort of feel like people tend to mistake politeness for support. But that's another thing all together and I digress.

Maybe find a different company. I ski 2 hours every weekday before I start my work day.

Depends how you define average.

Statistically, the average US workers has a much higher purchasing power than the average EU worker.

Unless by average you meant poor people or workers on minimum wage in which case you'd be correct, but that's in no way average anymore.

I was talking purely about “benefits” by which most people mean things outside of standard monetary compensation.

EU workers have much better vacation, healthcare, parental leave, severance pay, etc than US workers on average.

And I was only talking about the unemployment benefits of laid off big-tech workers. I'm not contradicting you about the rest.

The "continued vesting of stock awards for six months" piece specifically is, as far as I know, not mandated by law anywhere, and is really generous.

Depends on the EU country. Where I live you get 60% of your pay for something like 6 months, plus the public healthcare.

Though, it's not exactly a vacation, as you're expected to prove to the unemployment office you are actively looking for a job and interviewing and you're not allowed to leave the country during that period. I mean you can leave the country but you'll not receive unemployment or healthcare for that period.

You can leave easily and officially Germany during unemployment. Just bring the proof, that you sent your weekly applications and tell the Arbeitsamt officer that you’re leaving. They don’t really care about white collar workers making much more money than they do anyway. Their focus were blue collar workers and special cases like illiterate foreigner anyway. At least 5 years ago in Baden-Württemberg.

The difference is Microsoft doesn't have to be so generous.

most american's don't receive severance outside unpaid vacation

And yet they are. Even though they could give you nothing, they chose otherwise.

It's not just from the goodness of their hearts.

Fundamentally, they chose this approach because those who receive the benefits will have to sign NDAs and because they don't want their reputation as an employer to be poisoned.

There are two aspects to severance.

First it's a custom, like tipping, where it looks morally bad if you only give the minimum (2 months). Future employees will care if you have a reputation for treating current employees like shit; look how many people don't want to work for Amazon.

Second is it's a Newcomb paradox. Outgoing employees have the capability to do reputational damage to the company. The press has for the past 6 years been extremely happy to shit on tech. And even though a non-disparagement agreement is usually part of the severance package (NDA, NSA, NCA already in place), the company can't possibly retaliate against every disparager.

Also, in software people may have knowledge of (or might have planted) backdoors, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses, and now, might have been motivated to exploit them.

So severance can be also understood as "we know you have the capability to harm us and we can't stop you, so to tip the scales on how much you dislike us, here's a gift of extra money beyond WARN".

They aren’t doing it from the goodness of their hearts.

A lot of that will be to avoid costly lawsuits with employment tribunals etc.; cheaper for companies like microsoft, trying to reduce headcount, when a large number of their employess have the resources to fight (and after the layoffs will also have the time too)