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This is an uncharitable take. The ability to fire at-will is the reason companies in the US are able to hire and pay as high as they do. As a dual-national Brazilian-American who has also spent years living in Europe, the social contracts are very different, and different people might value different things, but I'll take the downside layoff risk in exchange for upside in pay and mobility.

> This is an uncharitable take. The ability to fire at-will is the reason companies in the US are able to hire and pay as high as they do.

I feel there is no rational basis for this belief, and it's mostly guided by wishful thinking to fool yourself into believing that all this penance leads to some kind of salvation.

It doesn't.

There are highly paid professionals in other countries who benefit from higher worke protection laws and even public services like working national health services and free education. Virtually all European countries ensure greater workers protection and half have a higher human development index than the US, and FANG salaries in Europe often lead to far greater disposable income. Heck, I personally know a FANG who was forced to pay overtime for oncalls in europe while US workers only get the pager app and the shaft.

Also, being subjected to abuse is not a requirement for mobility. Mobility only requires that you can quit your job and apply for other positions. There is no piece in the equation that requires abusive revolving door hiring practices.

People should shed their victim mentality and stop fooling themselves on how the path to riches is through suffering. It isn't. Basic human decency doesn't need to be thrown out of the window. That's only a requirement to screw over workers out of their rights and livelihood.

>Heck, I personally know a FANG who was forced to pay overtime for oncalls in europe while US workers only get the pager app and the shaft.

It does not follow that it leads to greater disposable income. Retail workers in the US also get paid overtime yet their disposable income is nowhere close to that of exempt (no overtime) programmers. Basically, with the tax rates in most of Europe, one's disposable income would be less even if the nominal income had been as same as in the US but it is not even close so you are, at best, misinformed when you think you get greater disposable income.

> It does not follow that it leads to greater disposable income.

It wasn't supposed to. It was suppose to point out a concrete example of how stronger worker protection leads to being paid fairly for the work you do, while US workers are not.

Meanwhile, feel free to check how any FANG salary for software engineers in places like Seattle compares with the cost of living, and how the salaries for equivalent positions in European cities like Amsterdam, which also has a notoriously high real estate, lead to higher disposable income.

As someone who's always heard that US pays much better but never verified it, this was interesting to look into.

According to levels.fyi, 90th percentile in the Greater Seattle area [0] is $344-363k USD while 90th percentile in the Greater Amsterdam area is $162-170k USD [1]. Taking the mid point of both ranges, you make 2.13 times more in Seattle before tax. After tax, you get $244,933 in Seattle [2] and $118,078.95 in Amsterdam (with requisite conversions from/to USD when using the linked tool) [3], bringing the difference to 2.07x more take-home in the US.

The next step is to compare cost of living. I don't know which source is most reliable, and not all sources include international cities, but a Reddit comment suggested Numbeo so that's what I went with [4]. It reports that local purchasing power in Amsterdam is 18.1% lower than Seattle, while categorized prices in Amsterdam are anywhere from 18.8% (restaurants) to 39.3% (groceries) lower in Amsterdam. So it seems you would need to have to be paid quite a bit more than 50% of your US total compensation to achieve the same standards of living.

I'll spare the details because I didn't look too deeply, but I also did look into the cost of major purchases that people value - houses (3 beds) and cars (specifically the Polestar 2, which is an EV more on the luxury side). These things are definitely not half as expensive in Amsterdam as in Seattle.

So, I can only conclude that US workers do end up with higher purchasing powers despite less worker protection. While European workers do get a lot of benefits, many I probably don't even know about as I don't live there, Big N-tier companies (besides Amazon) usually have generous benefits like employer-paid health insurance that lessen the gap in benefits somewhat.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...

[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...

[2] - https://smartasset.com/taxes/washington-tax-calculator#L3MFa...

[3] - https://thetax.nl/?year=2022&startFrom=Year&salary=900&allow...

[4] - https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

I'm not sure why this represents a victim mentality or some kind of penance. I don't see it that way at all. It's simply risk/reward and understanding how the economic incentives work independent of moral judgements.

As a founder it's crystal clear: you quit your job, you start building a company with no salary, you get some traction, get some investment, and if you work hard and have a good dose of luck along the way you can be very successful (far more than any salaried employee), or you might fail and earn nothing.

Now you add employees, they are expensive and you don't really know what the business climate will look like over time. You know you need some to fulfill your growth potential, but where is the point of diminishing returns? There's no way to know. The Silicon Valley VC model is: if you get a whiff of product-market fit and think you have a potential category-defining product, pour as much money in as you can to maximize scaling—even if it is wasteful or risks flaming out, you do it anyway because otherwise someone else may do it and win.

Now, if you are in a country like France, worker protections mean that if you over-hire, you risk killing the entire company because you overshot your mark and you can't do layoffs. This absolutely plays into hiring plans, and if you don't acknowledge this then it is you who are engaged in wishful thinking.

Note that I don't have anything against worker protections, I liked living in Europe and there are a lot of things that are preferable to the States, but economic upside for programmers like me is not one of them. FAANG definitely broke through the old glass ceilings for tech folks, but A) that competition was introduced by American capitalism and B) even for FAANG it's still significantly higher total comp stateside.

Perhaps the best of both worlds is American mobility coupled with European public services, as the other post mentioned- "working national health services and free education." Not having to stress over lack of health insurance or ability to pay off student debut (and medical debt!) would go a long way towards making American layoffs less existential.

> it's mostly guided by wishful thinking to fool yourself into believing that all this penance leads to some kind of salvation.

Something similar leads to russian people to support Putin. They know that they are wrong, but the thought that they are wrong and all the suffering was for nothing is too terrifying for their subconcience to even ankowledge.

Dont know why this got downvoted. HN to toilet.

> I understand that HN is a US-centric forum, where neoliberalism dictates the baseline and the interpretation of all things in life is reduced to a simplistic transaction in a theoretical free market.

The only reason Neofeudalism didn't quite arrive is that its difficult to get rid of unprofitable serfs. A lord was actually sort of responsible for his territory.

Here you can dump unwantes on the state and voila, no responsebility!

Is it neoliberalism specifically, or even just generally living in a capitalist society? (Which hey, I'm happy enough to live in a capitalist society, it has been good to me, but I definitely notice myself evaluating nearly everything through a financial or transactional lens).

I think it's very easy to live in a capitalist society and still treat people as human beings rather than financial instruments, but if you live like that you probably will not become CEO of Microsoft.

Its a tragedy of public education that people do not realise that there are different kinds of capitalism. After all, slave trade was capitalism too.

We just went through a massive transition from Kenzian to Neoliberal system, and nobody realised. The underperformance of Neoliberal system compared to its predessesor should be the biggest discussion point in all news.

Noone has even heard of shumpeterian theory.

Is the implication that some but not all kinds of capitalist societies would encourage or cause people to view many "normal" things (not just inherently or clearly transactional things) as transactional?

What would be the kinds of capitalism that would or would not cause a transactional mindset to seep into all parts of life?