There is certainly a balance to be struck. Being in a meat grinder that pays well is not super fun, and a lot of people would gladly take 70-80% of that in exchange for work/life balance and strong PTO.

TBH that's one of the reasons I chose the company I'm at now. I had other options, but having a team that I love and very healthy PTO won me over. To each their own!

Members of my family have serious health problems, and the company’s PPO plans cover medical treatments with world-class providers. It would probably be prohibitively expensive for us to purchase such a plan on the open market.

Basically a modern form of company town?

Instead of being indentured by spending company scrip at the company store you're staying because of health insurance that would otherwise be unaffordable to you.

Yeah, well. This is America.

Sometimes money is really not the only variable, unless it's a very large amount, say half a million.

For people with family, I believe a good insurance plan and flexibility in hours also mean a lot. Especially hours.

> For people with family, I believe a good insurance plan and flexibility in hours also mean a lot.

Healthcare is one of those things that's a perk in the US, but is not such a big deal in most western countries. Hopefully the US will be able to benefit from that someday.

Healthcare isn't much of a differentiator in the kinds of jobs being discussed here. Pretty much all of them will have good healthcare plans that are as close to free for the employee as the IRS and insurers will allow.

You still have to interact with the insanity of the American healthcare system, but you're not being financially ruined by it.

> a good insurance plan

Can be purchased with money.

> flexibility in hours

Hard to not get flexibility if remote is on the table, which it usually is for these jobs.

When I was a consultant, I could not find a health insurance plan that was even vaguely the equal of my current job's health insurance. Not too expensive, but simply not offered.

That's not to say that job insurance is automatically good -- the job I had before being a consultant had worse health insurance that was a little worse than the plans I had as a consultant.

My plan next time I'm doing any kind of c2c type work will be to setup with trinet or another similar company to handle payroll benefits, even if it is just me.

You'd still have GP's problem of not finding any decent health insurance offered for a single-employee business. Google "adverse selection."

The health insurance would be from TriNet (not a single-employee business). There are similar collective businesses.

Good luck with that... I don't know what your definition of "good" is, but in looking around when my cobra policy ran out, there were definitely limited options, none of which came close to what most of the worker policies offered, and none covered my retina doctor. The eye injections I get would be more out of pocket than my net income right now... and after 7 months out of work, I was seriously considering jobs paying roughly half of where I'd been the past few years just to maintain a good insurance plan.

I had about 12 months of buffer, but several unplanned home and auto repairs ate into that.

That certainly can be true (not universally) when a company that might give you an offer is saying it.

If it’s coming from a peer, especially one whose been round a few more blocks than you, may just be an observation about life.