Comment by pjmlp
3 hours ago
I rather have 30 day vacations, a proper life with 40h work week, healthcare, union membership, than SV salaries, which are nontheless an exception, most of the developers, that aren't even properly accredited Software Engineers, get the same salary as most office workers.
In which country do fast food workers get higher salaries than office workers, unless we are talking about tourism industry outside Europe, with said workers getting tips in Euros and Dollars instead of local currency?
> I rather have 30 day vacations, a proper life with 40h work week, healthcare, union membership, than SV salaries
This is an appeal to mediocrity and it doesn't really hold when comparing EU to Silicon Valley tech jobs. Young engineers in the Silicon Valley (or NYC, or Seattle) have excellent health care, generous vacation and other benefits, and they also make substantially more money.
Why would a young, ambitious engineering graduate care about taking 30 days off when they have the opportunity to work on frontier tech that is only available in the US? And make an absurd salary doing it? Healthcare is also less of a concern because 20 somethings and 30 somethings barely use any social benefits anyway. And like I said earlier, they also have exceptional private health care through their employer.
This claim that the European lifestyle is somehow better despite the extreme salary difference really just doesn't hold when comparing to early/mid-career tech workers in the US.
I'm American and I take 30 days of PTO a year. I get paid the national median for pay, but that still puts me in the top 10% of _household_ incomes for my state. I have good healthcare and benefits. Hell, I got sick last year and took 2 months off from work paid because my company has the policies to cover that and then I came back and it was fine.
Like, I find SV culture and living to be a cancer, but I'm just saying as someone who doesn't live in a top 10 city in the US with a MCOL, I struggle to think of how working as a software engineer in the EU would be better.
It's been over 10 years since that 2 weeks PTO nonsense applied to tech. I don't even have a fancy job. I work for a bank.