Sure, but things like health insurance can easily cost $1000+ a month if you want full coverage and/or have some bad health conditions(and you still need to have a big pot of savings in case you need to use it, because your out of pocket excess might be 10k or more). In most european countries the monthly cost is nowhere near that, it scales with your salary(down to zero if you don't earn anything) and still covers you for absolutely everything and of course there is no such thing as copay or excess. Not to mention that Americans are swimming in student debt, while in many European countries higher education is completely free, or nearly free so you simply don't have that expense at all.
Obviously once you start making 300k+ in US none of that really matters, you win at life in general - but it's not like people in Europe making 60k(euro) as software devs are in poverty or anything.
> Sure, but things like health insurance can easily cost $1000+ a month
I've posted this multiple times before, but a developer on $120k, paying $2500/month on rent and $1k on health insurance in california will have more left over at that point than a mid level engineer makes before tax in the UK. That gap is inexplainable by anything other than "You get paid a crap ton more"
> Obviously once you start making 300k+ in US none of that really matters, you win at life in general - but it's not like people in Europe making 60k(euro) as software devs are in poverty or anything.
Honestly, it doesn't matter at half of that, but the second part of your comment is bang on the money. I wouldn't take a tripling of my salary for a move to the US, for example.
> but things like health insurance can easily cost $1000+ a month if you want full coverage
Yeah but if you multiple that by 12, you get something like $12k, or $15k for argument's sake. That $15k does not explain the disparity between a €55k/yr salary and a $150k/yr salary, so clearly there is another force that is at play here.
People in almost all tech companies are not going to be paying $1000 a month for insurance. I know self employed people paying less than that for a family of 4.
My wife pays a little more then $200 a paycheck for a family of 4 for a non high deductible plan. At my worst job it would’ve been $700 for a family of 4 with a $100 spousal surcharge (only if they could get other insurance through their work).
