If you get paid 20% more but spend 20% of your salary on services you wouldn't need to buy otherwise - isn't it parity already?
I think you are possibly massively underestimating how much it is possible to get paid as even an average software developer in the US. Like literally off by an entire order of magnitude.
I would guess it's more like 100%-400% more for equivalent jobs, and many people at. Plus your US job covers your healthcare etc.
Long time ago I worked in the US company based out of the Toronto area that ended up with IT ops people in call centers all over the US and Canada. It worked really well -- the Canadian developers were awesome, and IT type people are easy to train. They seemed to be able to attract well educated graduates with locally competitive salaries that were below average by US standards. Over the years I've dealt with a few smaller Canadian consultancies and they always seemed to punch above their weight.
If you can provide good work, there is alot of Canadian talent that wants to work in Canada.
The weird thing is that all of the players have significant people investments outside of the US. These often start as support and maintenance operations but often grow into more over time.
It's legitimately surprising to me that companies don't "offshore" to Cincinnati, Minneapolis or Tampa. IBM used to have success doing that, for example. Defense contractors too, although obviously there is a political and a "be close to the customer" element to having engineers next to an air force base.
I live in one of the less wealthy EU countries. Almost everybody have 26 days of paid leave a year here. If I'm sick it's additional paid leave. University education and healthcare is free. Retirement is handled as well (but you got to save something yourself additionally if you want quality time on retirement).
There's a combined year of paid maternity/paternity leave for each kid. Cities are clean and safe, police shoots like 100 bullets a year nationally and usually it's warning shots. There were no mass shootings, ever. Last time police killed someone without obvious explanation it was a huge scandal and it's still discussed 4 years later on national level.
I use a car once a month at most, usually I ride a bike or just walk everywhere. There's also public transport that's cheap, clean and dependable (not so great during the pandemic though). There's no social stigma associated with walking/biking or using public transport.
Property tax is almost nonexistent, if you work as a senior developer you can buy several flats in a big city, rent them, and live from that, if you wish.
You can buy a flat in a big city for about 5 years of average developer's salary. All the costs of living are set for people who earn less than 1/5th of what you earn. You have all the interesting countries right there, you can visit them by bike, car, train, or fly (if you are flexible with the date usually you can find 2-way flights for less than $100 between any 2 places in EU).
I mean it would be nice to have millions of USD but if I have to deal with the paperwork, no holidays to speak of, spend hours in traffic every day, and afterwards the only significant difference in quality of life is a few more 0s on my bank account - nah, I'll pass.
It would probably be different if I wanted to start a global business.
That's about what I was making in a medium (~100k) midwestern city over a decade ago and less than the average software developer there makes now.
I'm pretty surprised by how big of a difference it is honestly. Even companies like Amazon and Microsoft in Vancouver were only averaging 100k CAD salaries. (Stock helps, but that would be an extremely low salary just a few hours away in Seattle)
There's a much greater spread of wages in the US than in other comparable countries, so it's attractive for those of us towards the higher end of the scale. Coming from the UK though I do miss the feeling of freedom from being able to take a long break between jobs and not having to worry about healthcare.
There are also career issues - there are just very, very few places in Canada where you can go on to earn 'mid/late career big bucks' in tech.
In Canada, all the expensive stuff is cheap but the cheap stuff is expensive.
Why?
Those are what you generally need to be able to consider working in other countries.
Those are largely what the readership of a software VC firm forum are going to have.
I, on the other hand, think that high taxes end up benefitting everyone through greater services for those down on their luck which seems to translate to less desperation, less resentment, less classism, less crime. Basically overall far better peace of mind for all involved even though getting filthy rich isn't as much a thing. It's totally possible there are other circumstances at play here like the relative homogeneity of Scandinavian countries relative to the US so this is just a working hypothesis at the moment.
That's a perfectly reasonable decision.
That said, far more Scandinavians have calculated that they would rather have the US approach than the other way around. Whether on an absolute or (especially) per capita basis, far more Swedes and Norwegians move to the US than follow your lead and move to Scandinavia.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4rcl0o/til_a...