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Well salaries also ignore health insurance, unemployment benefits, pensions etc. which artificially inflate the difference between the US and Europe. Also other things like childcare and schooling. I mean just the difference between what one has to pay for childcare per year can amount to several $10k and then there is college. So these calculations are definitely not so straight forward.

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All of that is true, but at the scale we’re talking about those are rounding errors.

Sure, housing in the Bay Area costs $36k more per year and yeah, you might shell out $10k in a year for medical if you have a baby and yeah, your kid might cost $20k per year in private school, but when you’re taking home $200k more per year, an extra $50k doesn’t move the needle much.

While that's true (and on the other side, the analysis also doesn't consider tax rates), I think those are fairly minor compared to the effect of equity on compensation. Looking at Dropbox as an example of a U.S. tech company that I picked at random-ish, I see compensation range from 40-165% higher than salary, which means a huge difference.

https://www.levels.fyi/company/Dropbox/salaries/Software-Eng...

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