Comment by fooker
1 month ago
Sure, if they want to pay decent salaries.
But no, you can make 3-4x in the US. That’s not an exaggeration. And before someone says ‘free healthcare’, big-tech employers in the US provide pretty nice insurance for employees that caps maximum out of pocket expenses to about a week of your salary.
EU (except Zurich and London) tech salaries have sort of stagnated to a point that you make about the same in Bangalore, and spend significantly more.
Conveniently enough, neither Zurich nor London are in the EU anyways!
You’re right, I meant Europe.
But makes me wonder if EU policies are contributing to wage stagnation.
There had been several high profile cases in the US about wage stagnation, so much that tech companies are a bit wary of this topic.
Surely you mean wage suppression (as in e.g. the unlawful agreement between Apple and Google).
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Losing a week of salary is still pretty bad. How many days off do you get? Days that you can actually take without losing the chance for a promotion?
> Losing a week of salary is still pretty bad
Keep in mind the salary is 3-5x for big tech positions with 5+ years of experience. Check levels.fyi if you don’t believe me.
> Days that you can actually take without losing the chance for a promotion?
Europe wins hands down on this. I happen to have a great employer where I have taken 4-5 weeks off a year without issues, but that’s not the norm in the US.
Add free education and childcare to the mix and the difference shrinks quite a bit.
Not to mention the fascism problem of course.
Free education and childcare doesn’t come close to shrinking a 300k USD gap in total compensation. Real number in my case, I looked into moving to Berlin last year.
> Not to mention the fascism problem of course.
Agreed.
The US is going in a terrible direction with this. I hope Europe has learned from history and won’t follow.
I could make 2x-3x if I moved to the US.
Turns out I can live a pretty comfortable life with EU salary. I could afford a house, car, family. Quality of Life is pretty great.
I am not sure if the extra money in the US would be worth it.
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> I hope Europe has learned from history and won’t follow.
France was recently an absolute inspiration in this regard.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrlxn4ngdgo
Most people in the US don't earn SV top salaries, and for most people the difference is not that big (was my point).
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And it's really hard to land a job in Switzerland simply because there is a small market with tendency to offshore everything except high management.
Swissre, UBS and many others all have open positions in Spain/Poland/India, not actually in Switzerland
Actual formal engineering jobs in Switzerland come with benefits gold plating better than full federal government employees in the USA. And they’re almost as hard to sack.
Nobody gives out positions like that easily to non geniuses. And even for more ordinary very smart candidates, there are enough of them to have a few hoops to jump through.
> But no, you can make 3-4x in the US. That’s not an exaggeration
Eh, we'll see how long that lasts as the transition from financial capital to global pariah progresses. It's quite possible that our labor is extremely overvalued.
Right now it relies on silicon valley's ability to churn out unicorns again and again.
That part seems to be taking an ugly turn nowadays by a bunch of military AI/drone swarm/etc focused startups. I'm guessing that eventually after the Apple/Google model of making money is dead, you'll have to work for Skynet if you want to make money.
Those "decent salaries" have caused a lot of trouble in the US. They are probably not that good for the society, even if they attract foreign talent.
There is not much difference in labor share of GDP between the US and the EU. People who work for living get a similar share of the value they create in both blocks on the average (maybe a bit less in the US), but it's less evenly distributed in the US.
Top 10% earners are now responsible for ~50% of consumer spending. That doesn't mean billionaires and capitalists, but upper middle class professionals and other high earners. The economy is great on the average, but most people don't feel it.
> They are probably not that good for the society
I don't disagree, as in an abstract sense inequality is bad for society.
Try to understand why the US has high tech salaries though. It is because the last 40 years have made it pretty easy and convenient to start companies.
Hence, good employees always have great options or can just start their own companies.
> Try to understand why the US has high tech salaries though. It is because the last 40 years have made it pretty easy and convenient to start companies.
I thought this was because US trade and foreign policy coerced most of the world to open up their markets to high-margin American services via treaties. It's easy to pay high salaries when you're vacuuming money from around the world, and your product (software) has very low marginal cost of replication.