No paid sick leave? One week of vacation? Super expensive education (for kindergarten???)?

Where in the US are you talking about? While we don't tend to have laws mandating sick leave, nearly every company that you'd immigrate for gives it. I've never worked anywhere that didn't offer at least two weeks of vacation.

Working 50+ hours is really a personal choice (as long as you work for an ethical employer) since it isn't legal to require someone to work more than 40 hours/week.

I'm not sure about super expensive education. Out of state tuition is typically expensive if you want to go to a top university, but the average community college is downright cheap.

No offense, but your proof here is purely anecdotal. I've worked for employers who offer less than two weeks. My first STEM job offered 5 days your first year, with 5 more each additional year, capping at 20. 2 weeks may be thought of as the norm, but since there is no actual law about it, its only a suggestion.

|Working 50+ hours is really a personal choice (as long as you work for an ethical employer) since it isn't legal to require someone to work more than 40 hours/week.

This is only true if you are hourly, and dont fall under a salaried exception. Its also only true if your employer is ethical, as you say. Since the US is largely at-will, you can be fired for most any reason. They aren't even required to tell you why. So, if you turn down your unethical boss insistence on a 50 hour week at a 40 hour weeks pay, you can be on the street in an hour. You can try to fight it, but the laws in the US are stacked in the employers favor.

|I'm not sure about super expensive education. Out of state tuition is typically expensive if you want to go to a good university, but the average community college is downright cheap.

This is generally true. JC are comparably cheap, but contrast this against someplace in the EU that has "high" tuition. A 4 year degree from a good school in England will set you back about 30k. Here, an equivalently prestigious degree can cost you 150k, easy. While you may learn the same at a 2 year JC, which will still cost you 15k by the by,you lack the prestige that a University degree gets you. Sadly, thats what gets you in the door. So, to be equally prestigious, you need to have 150k in debt in the US, and only 30K in debt in the UK. Thats not the same at all.

For professional jobs in the US, the average paid vacation after the first year of service is 10 days (2 weeks)[1]. Sadly they don't have statistics for 0-1 years so I don't know if your package was atypical.

That said, we certainly don't match our European counterparts, but then again, we don't even use most of the vacation time we are given every year[2]. The US simply doesn't have a culture of taking vacations like Europe.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm

[2] http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/18/news/economy/unused_vacation...

If a hiring company is playing by the immigration rules then they should be paying at least going-rate for the position they are hiring you into (as well as having to pick up substantial legal fees). If you are just cheap labor then they will abuse you - but why would you take a job knowing you are not being valued from day 1?

Anecdotal, and also, in most of Europe one is legally obliged to have at least four weeks. I'm pretty sure I'd just burn-out quite quickly only having two weeks a year, myself.

Now, compare that to parent comment which obviously considers two weeks of vacation per year a good deal for the USA.

I work far away from where my family lives, meaning the only time I really get to see them is over Christmas. Simply going back to visit them eats up 2 weeks out of my 3 weeks.

So each year I effectively only have one actual week for actual time off. It sucks. I am seriously considering negotiating for 5+ weeks at my next job, but this is basically unheard of in the USA.

Studying at Germany’s best public universities (e.g. LMU Munich, FU Berlin etc.) will set you back about 250 € per term (6 months), which includes a public transport ticket (or about 50€ if said public transport ticket is not mandatory for all students).

How ‘cheap’ exactly is a community college?

California State University system by comparison costs $6,600 in tuition for the year while the University of California system is around $13,000. Of course both of those are probably located nowhere near your home, so you'll end up spending a far greater amount on room and board if you need it.

They also provide an affordable way of transitioning to a four-year college for the highly motivated and in some states, top-ranking high school students can enroll in community college to earn an associates degree their high school pays for putting them on an accelerated path.

[*] fortunately I had a friend who was dedicated to producing beautiful lecture notes in LaTeX

You can also just work for Google in Europe for a year or two, and then get transferred over on a L1/L2 visa where your wife can also get a work permit/visa as part of the package.

Also if you work for a company like google/facebook, you get very good health care, can send your children to decent public schools, you have decent working hours, good amount of vacation time, far more pay than you would get in Europe, free meals and I think google offers on site kindergarden too. Also while you just have a work visa, you can still change employers through more paperwork, but no practical ill effects in the end.

I'm here on an L1A visa with my spouse. She quit her high paying job and followed me here after our lawyers said that getting the visa was the hard part.

We have been waiting on her L2 work permit since May. Processing time is supposed to be three months. We called, scheduled an appointment with the USCIS, all that. They say it's being processed, and the lawyers say there is nothing to do but wait.

If you search the internet, you'll find plenty of people waiting to hear back from the USCIS for trivial stuff. Apparently, sometimes they even sit on your application for years, wait for the visa to expire, and then reject on that basis.

1) Not everyone works for Google or Facebook. Some of us work for smaller companies that no one has heard of.

2) "Also while you just have a work visa, you can still change employers through more paperwork".

Said paperwork is toxic and suffocating to the point where it is extremely detrimental to your mental and physical health to change jobs.

A smaller startup company will ask more hours of you and wont provide such things as an on site kindergarden, but the benefits can be fairly comparable. Some of those startups also have a foreign office you could work at for a year or two and do the L1 visa thing for you too.

If you define pay as something that you can spend when you deduce tax, health, pension, rent/mortgage, education of children I'm not sure that US offers double. And even if it were double in absolute numbers, so is the number of working hours per year of software engineer in US compared to Germany.

I define pay the way most people define pay. The gross amount paid to you by your employer per pay period.

>And even if it were double in absolute numbers, so is the number of working hours per year of software engineer in US compared to Germany.

Unless the average German software engineer works 20-25 hours a week, I'd love to see some statistics on this. According to OECD stats, US workers work 30% more hours than Germans. There's no reason to believe that's different for software devs (in fact, especially on the west coast, it probably trends in the opposite direction).

http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS

I was also unaware rent and mortgages are free in Germany. Why do you not have to take those into account?