Comment by IkmoIkmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IkmoIkmo | Hacker News Reader

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A few thoughts:

1) SMBs don't necessarily hire that many software engineers. Hell, even tons of large companies barely do. I work at a multinational (100 countries) which mostly buys off the shelf software, and uses basic tools like Excel to run a ridiculous amount of internal business processes.

2) Non-software companies tend to hire software companies, not software engineers. Due to the economies of scale that comes with companies producing and selling (standardised enterprise) software, salaries of software devs aren't that big of a problem necessarily. A company like Trello for example built a collaboration tool with 10s of engineers that has something like 100 million users. The numbers aren't exact, but the order of magnitude is.

Beyond that, you'd be surprised how large the nominal income differences are for US/EU companies, individuals, households etc. The extra money doesn't translate into much better quality of life in the US (due to the crappier working hours, the no legal holiday rights, crappy parental leave, no cheap universal healthcare or tertiary education, poor public transport, no walkable cities, inequality, more energy-intensive economy blablabla), but purely on a nominal dollar basis the US really outearns Europe by quite a large margin.

The anti-American scree at the end here is hilariously inaccurate. The "inequality" has a kernel of truth- but that's why having a high salary in the US is amazing.

I'm an average developer at an unglamorous company you've never heard of. I have unlimited vacation and lots of company holidays. Parental leave is full pay for 5 or 6 months, my monthly healthcare costs are the same as a single hour of wage if I was paid hourly, which thankfully I'm on salary because I really only work about 30 hours a week. My city isn't very walkable overall, but my high salary means I can live in the area that is. Oh, and despite buying everything that I want I still save so much that I'll be retired at age 40.

And again- I'm not special or unique or lucky or privileged. I went to a public school in a poor area, got a job by applying to a public listing with no connections, and haven't had any lucky IPO or investment win, just plain boring salary at a plain boring company writing CRUD applications.

Western Europe gives a better quality of life than America if you're low income. America gives better quality of life if you're high income. Eastern Europe is mostly lower quality regardless of occupation.

I don't know how you define Eastern Europe, but I've had a bunch of friends who moved back to Poland after working in Google in the Bay Area, claiming that the quality of life is better here.

Ditto myself - I spend winters in SF, because of the weather and amazing people and the community there, but in most other aspects Warsaw wins. City cleanliness, restaurants & coffee places (sic), access to schools, transportation, and healthcare. SF by comparison has awesome nature, clean air and brilliant community. Plus access to one-day shipping of a ton of stuff unavailable in Europe.

As for lower-income people, I'm curious what metrics you used. With the main ones that come to my mind (education, healthcare, work benefits, unemployed benefits) I think Poland and Europe win. But lower income people can't afford cars and iPhones - so that's different.

Pretty much everyone can afford a car these days. You're probably thinking of a new car.

Buying a car is only one part. You're probably true that pretty much anyone could buy a car, even if that's just an old Matiz. But also to maintain, insure and fuel it? No.

You would only get third party insurance, not full coverage. Then it will become much cheaper.

Yearly OC, as what it's called in Poland, is still about 50% of value of Matiz.

That is crazy. Seems you guys are being ripped off by the insurance companies!

The final bit of my post wasn't talking about software developers, but simply about the differences in income between the US and EU in general, and how they don't translate into as large differences in quality of life. It's quite obvious that software developers get way better deals in the US and tons of perks, no need to add your personal story because besides it being merely an anecdote, it completely misses the point you're responding to.

Defining quality of life can be hard and subjective but at a US BugTechCo you typically work 35-45hrs, have top shelf insurance, unlimited vacation (that people use and sometimes paid paid vacation where you get paid while you’re on vacation AND get paid to take one as a bonus) Also we have a ton of holidays (sup Juneteenth!) as for public transport the US is BIG but ya we should work on that, also more dense cities, I agree there.

Can also just buy a place in the EU once you’re rich from FAANG life… or with full remote go make the US salary there.

Unlimited vacation?

Some tech companies offer "unlimited vacation" these days as the official vacation policy.

It's great if you feel you can actually take it, but most people don't.

It generally means there isn't a defined amount or minimum amount, and everyone knows if you actually take a lot of time off, your output will not look as good compared with your colleages.

The undertone of competing with colleages for recognition hasn't gone away after all. Even if you're not ambitious, you probably value job security, so you don't want to look like a slacker or low output person.

So in practice, at "unlimited vacation" companies people tend to take less vacation than they do at companies with a defined amount of vacation.

Local culture also ends up influencing what people do. I'm working for a company that has "unlimited vacation" and also a very international, fully remote workforce. What they have found is, even though the company policy is the same everywhere, people in the USA choose to take much less official vacation (up to about 2 weeks) than people in France (about 5 weeks). This is the individual's choice remember. Also the amount people have taken has reduced during the pandemic.

They are actually trying to get people to take more vacation, and have set a minimum amount to try to enforce this. My guess is people don't want to be seen as slacking during a time when alternative employment prospects are uncertain and keeping remote work is a priority.

That's really interesting. I'm in the UK and the consensus is generally that the US doesn't give much holiday to staff and that Europe is more generous. I'd never heard of unlimited vacation before. Here the standard is 28 days plus the 8 or 9 public holidays, so about 36 days off per year. In Europe it's more, and often you must take them.

> the consensus is generally that the US doesn't give much holiday to staff and that Europe is more generous.

That's correct, the US has 0 legal holidays, everything is contractual. That typically means around 7-8 days and builds up with seniority.

It's pretty poor: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm

But anything contractual for the most in-demand jobs (such as software engineers today), is way better than the minimum legal standard or the average contractual standard. From pay to insurance to holidays to things like housing, free food, sports and mental counseling.

The basic rule is that you're better off in a more unequal society when you're at the top, and better off in a more equal society when you're at the bottom. There's of course a limit to this logic.

Then if you take the software devs that tend to frequent HN, (the majority of devs at a FAANG firm will know of HN and visit it from some to time), you're looking at say the top quartile among software devs. It's quite clear that most software devs are better off in the US in many respects, and that their holiday perks can be way better than the average American or European. Plenty of great software companies in the US offer unlimited time off. Most people don't really use it though, it's more a cultural thing.

While this was much more true maybe 10 to 20 years ago, at least 28 days plus the approx 9 US public holidays is the minimum you should expect in a reasonable US SWE position. Many places offer better. Of course there isn’t the same level of legislative protection for holiday allowances as in the U.K. and there are some companies out there offering much less, but it’s increasingly rare in my experience.

I think working conditions relative to the USA have gotten significantly worse in the U.K. for a lot of professional roles over the past 20 years though - the pay offered in many U.K. SWE roles is often risible and the generally anaemic economy since the credit crunch arguably hasn’t helped.

I took 3 months off paid for parental leave and will have taken about 4 additional weeks this year and it has not hurt my performance reviews or career trajectory at all…

In some places, people may be wrong to worry about taking their unlimited vacation time how they would like to, but they do worry nonetheless.

At other places, more competitive perhaps, they may be right to evaluate that a dip in work output is noticed and nobody is taking into account the time off.

Anyway, without judging why, it appears to be a fact that at some places people take less time off when unlimited vacation policies are brought in.

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