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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

>* Substantially more actual vacation time

This depends on the company, last startup I worked at gave me around 6 weeks of vacation per year not counting holidays. Of course I got paid less than FAANG but still better than Europe even without the equity.

>* Substantially cheaper and yet similar health, dental, and vision coverage

I have heard a lot of people in Europe (UK and Germany) complain about issues with getting health coverage for non life threatening issues unless they also had private insurance. No idea how many companies pay for that in Europe.

>* Less risk/stress associated with job security

My bank account is my job security. I don't think I ever was worried about job loss after a few years of building up savings.

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I guess my point on vacation is more around the culture of using it. As a senior level engineer/architect with maybe a small team leading role, when was the last time you took a solid 2 week off without anyone calling you for work? Heck, look at the number of unlimited PTO companies out there where employees never take a day. Just as an example.

The experience my friends have in the EU seems to be pretty good over all with healthcare. The US healthcare system give fantastic results at a phenomenal and often strange price. It's a trade-off I'm sure.

I agree that having savings helps. And I have quite a bit of savings. But I still wouldn't feel comfortable being laid off .

Over all I'm here in the US and I love it. But I'm pointing out that there is give and take to everywhere.

Also everyone keeps talking about working for FAANG but.... The vast majority of US engineers don't work for them.

> Also everyone keeps talking about working for FAANG but.... The vast majority of US engineers don't work for them.

True, but since FAANGs have offices all over the world, employ a ton of people and doing market research for salaries they should offer, it might be a pretty good idea to look at them and compare what they pay per country to see disproportions

I suspect a lot of us just got back from two weeks off. Dec 19 though Jan 3 (inclusive) for me.

The VP of Eng at my current job routinely takes a week off where he is utterly unreachable (I believe he literally went to amish country last time). The same applies to the rest of the engineering team. It's been the same at my previous two companies as well. No, it's not the norm at companies but there's plenty where that's the case.

In my experience, the US is a place where little is given to you but you can get a lot. But you cannot take anything for granted. If you value vacation then you need to grill potential employers on that point and be willing to take a job that pays less. Most people value money so if you value something different you need to be proactive about getting it.

You make a great point and one thing I posted a bit further down was when I was a director level I did a really poor job of leading by example when it came to vacation. I would literally force people to use their pto and I didn't and they would feel weird or bad. I should have been more like your VP.

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