> I'd wager that even after accounting for taxes, most Europeans have more money in their pocket than Americans working in the same field.
Having worked in SF and Berlin... SF was definitely better paid overall and I made enough money to buy a nice apartment in Berlin, something which seems unachievable by working in Berlin all your life.
> Eh the salaries are alright. It seems to me like the salaries are higher in America, while in Germany they're lower but include things American end up paying for: pensions, insurance, and education.
While that's true, above-average earners like engineers/doctors/laywers definitely come on top in the US. Also for most of these people health insurance is paid for by the company.
The trade-off is for everyone else basically, who get a much shittier deal in the US compared to what they would get in any EU country.
>The US has a higher cost of living than most other countries. Those who are comparable pay somewhat more competitively with US jobs. This becomes really clear with remote work. Outside of the major tech hubs, the pay for IT drops off to comparable levels with European companies.
This is partially true but I thought the cost of living in Europe was generally higher than in the US.
> To me living in Europe makes more sense (more stable and secure), but life in the US is somehow more fun. That is until you run out of money (be it because of medical bills or because you got sued...)
yes, European countries tend to have much better safety nets, but they also come with significantly higher taxes. as a software engineer in the states, you can also expect to get paid about twice as much for the same work. there may be some good reasons to prefer Europe, but they probably aren't economic.
>And an important detail to remember is that Europeans usually work a lot less than Americans. Due to progressive taxes people tend to choose for more time off rather than more pay.
Yep, anecdotal but time is just so much more valuable in my 20s than the extra (taxed) money. The sweet spot atleast for me is a 3 day work week. Pays enough and it has a decent balance.
I could never trade this situation for a US dev job even for 3-4x the salary.
sure, it's no Silicon Valley but you can get decent/well paid jobs with a bit of trying. My salary was even slightly better than what I made in Germany before
>At some point, higher individual compensation doesn't matter much if everyone else in your community is overworked and underpaid.
I think that totally depends on the individual and their circumstances.
>I think many Dutch or French software developers are living better lives than developers in California, all things considered.
European developers generally earn much less than Americans, especially after taxes you can get to a 2x difference with comparable cost of living depending on area.
In generally wages in Europe are much more even, here in Germany you have a heavily bracketed income tax system, even significant increases in wage usually become much smaller if you consider the additional taxes.
> It is not enough to compare raw numbers, since the cost of living is so different. Healthcare is a famous example.
Yes, but this has the opposite effect from what you'd expect. The US has higher disposable income, both per capita and at the median, than Europe does. That means that, even accounting for the greater cost of healthcare in the US, households end up with greater purchasing power.
That's true across the country, but if you're comparing tech jobs, the effect is even more pronounced, because most tech companies provide health plans that ultimately are comparable (in terms of out-of-pocket expenses) to coverage in most of Europe. So you end up with significantly higher salaries[0], much lower taxes, and comparable health benefits.
As you point out, there may be other reasons that someone might not want to move (or be able to move), but there's no ignoring that salaries, disposable income, and purchasing power are dramatically higher in the US.
[0] London, for example, typically pays about half what you get in NYC or SF, for the same job title at the same company.
> Does strong union actually result in better pay?
I could make double my salary if I accepted offers from US companies, but I've chosen to live in Europe instead.
Money is a mean to something, ultimately. I actually believe that the labor protections and social safety net provided in European countries typically makes for a healthier society.
> There are plenty of well paid tech jobs in Europe.
The point was about letting working class people grow into middle class, i.e. accumulate some wealth by working at these jobs. It's much more difficult to do in Europe than in the US. First the tax system that is progressive on income, but not on net worth, that makes it increasingly hard to get richer by having good income. Second property prices are high and growing faster than income normally does. And finally as you've noticed these jobs are just not as well paid as in the US - basically it's the same grade as other office jobs (except managers and lawyers, these are paid much better)
> I don't think that's a considerations for most. Salary differences internally in both the US and Europe are large enough that there's a huge overlap.
How does that work? Presumably if the median salary for a given field is 40% lower, then the jobs which pay at my well-above-the-median salary are going to be much fewer and farther between with more competition. Add to that laws that (understandably) favor EU citizens and it seems like it would be quite difficult to get one's hands on those positions?
> Tax rates also depends greatly on which locations you're comparing. Between e.g. California and the UK the difference was small enough when I looked into it that it'd be easily eaten up by healthcare.
Yeah, like I said, I'm less concerned about tax rates. No surprise that California tax rates are comparable to London tax rates though; California is notoriously expensive and many Californians seem eager to move to other parts of the country.
> Now it seems you’d make slightly more in Berlin than in London.
Out of curiosity, got any sources to back this up?
> Zalando, Delivery Hero, Hello Fresh [...] pay more on the entire scale [...] than comparable companies in London.
The thing is London has a lot more tech jobs than just overrated web-shops and shitty food delivery apps that depend on underpaid bicycle delivery workers from abroad to be profitable (basically modern salve labor).
In London you have big-oil, big-real-estate, all the FAANGs, finance, HFT, AI, med-tech and many opportunities to be a contractor for 600 pounds/day in the City, opportunities far above what working for some web-shop and food-delivery app pay in Berlin, as those are mostly body-shop visa factories anyway that burn people out (from what I've heard).
I'm not advocating for one or the other, I don't have a dog in this fight, but the upper end salaries in London vastly overtake the upper end spectrum in Berlin. And anecdotally, the last salaries offers I got in Berlin were all laughable. I got better offers in the semiconductor industry in Dusseldorf working less hours.
> comes with a purchasing power that I imagine meets or exceeds someone in my same position in New York or the Bay Area
That seems very unlikely. Housing is expensive in most of the major metropolitan areas in the US, but you more than make up for it with higher salaries.
The rest of your argument makes perfectly good sense, there's lots to love about living and working in Europe! It may well be worth it to you.
But it's disingenuous to mix those quality of life arguments with an argument about money. Tech workers in the US tech hubs live a financially/materially more comfortable life than those in Europe.
> The max I negotiated in Europe was $125000, an ok start up salary was maybe $80000 and I am currently - with lots of non-money benefits at around $70000.
I'm currently at $160k (as a contractor, assuming 5 weeks of per year). Could have had more, but I'm currently in low cost of living country (former soviet block), so any move would be offset by increase in taxes and costs of living.
You can make good money in Europe, it's probably just harder here than in the US.
> Because life is incredibly cheap compared to most of Europe, your odds of making a decent life are much greater - the bar can be set much lower. To give you an idea - my monthly paycheck at my first job was just over 700 euros(underpaid even for a developer with little to no experience). I had rent, bills, transportation and food to take care of and even with that, I was still able to save up around 250/month. Something unthinkable for most European capitals on such a tight budget. Now, many years later, things look really well for me.
I think you're mistaken about software salaries. In the US, even for entry level positions, you can save up several thousand dollars a month, living just fine.
I was HEAVILY underpaid out of college (due to growing up in a shitty part of the states and consequently going to a shitty university). I graduated in a decent amount of debt, too. Even still, I was able to pay of $15k worth of debt, and save another $10k on just a $70K salary -- in Boston in 2010 (which at the time was just as expensive as NYC or SF).
At the time, that was double what my parents made put together, so it seemed unbelievable to me. I knew people at the company were making double and triple that, but for some reason I thought that I'd never make that. How could I? My parents were making 1/10th of that...
I'm now saving close to $200k a year at Google. My friend just got a job in SF. He's got 0 experience -- just graduated from a coding bootcamp. He got multiple offers for ~$150k. Almost everyone in his class got similar jobs. Even as expensive as SF is, he's going to have a nice apartment, be able to eat out at restaurants and go on vacations, and still save thousands a month.
I know salaries are really shitty in Europe compared to the US -- which is sad, because even here inequality is absurd.
Starting out, it's easy to think you're wage won't grow, so it's tempting to think you need to live more affordably. Or else how else would your life be sustainable?
When I first started working, I was always thinking about leaving the city and going back to my shitty part of the States and working remote jobs for peanuts. In hind-sight, that would've been a terrible decision.
I'm doing better than most people I know, sure... But virtually every person I worked with at my first job is now making $200k+ somewhere. Same thing with my second job. At Google most people are making $300k+.
I would've never dreamed making this type of money. Part of the problem -- for me at least -- is that if you grow up somewhere pretty poor, it's easy to think you're "lucky" even when you're underpaid. I never negotiated for higher salaries when I started. I always thought I was getting paid so much it was absurd.
But then I started looking around at what other people were getting paid, and realized if I have the same skills, I should get paid just as much, too.
Now I can literally buy my mom's house with 8 months of savings. I'm planning to retire both of my parents a few years early. If I wanted to go back to my hometown now, I could join them in retirement in another 3 years or so.
But I won't. I like my job. It's easy to find a good job now. Where I grew up is fine, but it's filled with people with no hope -- because that town has nothing to offer anymore. It's sad, but it's true.
Starting out, it's really tough. Looking back on it now, I was basically living in poverty in college and almost certifiably my first year in Boston. As an anecdote, I literally didn't have heat because in Boston a lot of houses are heated with oil, and oil was almost $150 a barrel at the time. Heating the apartment was like $1k a month. I couldn't afford it. So in the Winter, which is long in Boston, I literally was in my sleeping bag any time I was home...
What a shitty life! It felt like things wound never get better. I told myself, I can't deal with this shit. Working my ass off and living in a Goddamned sleeping bag! I never thought I'd get promoted -- there wasn't much growth at the company so not any opportunity. House prices would never go down (it was 2011, so they were already half off compared to 2008, and still way out of my range). So I'd never be able to have a home, I thought.
At least for me, everyone I knew who stuck with it, it paid off really well.
Despite working at Google, I'm not particularly smart either. It's just how it is, if you can stick with it.
In the end, it's a rat race, and I can see why people get out of it. My story isn't to shame you, but I think you can make a lot more money even in Bulgaria, and if you can, you deserve it.
> And to rant a little more, a high end engineer that would cost $200k in Washington/California (maybe NYC too) would start at 50k euro in Berlin. They'd top out around 70k euro at the most. Even for really highly skilled positions, Germany tends to have way less income inequality and flats are also way more affordable for everyone.
Which is why I moved to the States in the first place. I may have fallen from the top-ish of the pile to the bottom-ish. But the glass ceiling is waaaay higher.
Having worked in SF and Berlin... SF was definitely better paid overall and I made enough money to buy a nice apartment in Berlin, something which seems unachievable by working in Berlin all your life.
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