> While the average American is lucky to get 11 vacation days
WHAT? Does that count sick days as well, or is that a myth?
Here in Germany, I get 30 vacation days per calendar year, plus any sick days, and thats fairly normal.
Edit: Sure the absolute salaries here are lower, but the cost of living is vastly different and the social support structures and healthcare are different, too. That should definitely be kept in mind.
I dont need to drive my car a lot, because my city is fully walkable/bikeable, and thats not a super rare thing here. There are a lot of factors.
I feel vacation days are just a basic requirement for happiness, whereas being rich maybe isnt
I live in a big European city. You basically don't need a car - pretty much anything within the city is reachable in about 30min, and public transit is comfy.
Also, I have a public transit ticket that allows me to travel the entire country for a year, which only cost about 1000€.
Yes, salaries are lower, but I also don't have to save anything to get my kids through university, or keep emergency funds for health issues.
Also, I can't just get fired without cause. And if I do get laid off, I have 3 months of grace period, plus potentially years of unemployment money.
Also, the government even pays for certain courses so I can find employment again.
> Also, I can't just get fired without cause. And if I do get laid off, I have 3 months of grace period, plus potentially years of unemployment money.
Which causes companies to be very slow in hiring people, because if business turns they have less flexibility. European countries have some of the highest (youth) unemployment rates in the OECD:
Salaries are so much lower than our American counterparts you'll be working right up until our government mandated retirement age, which is increasing. Our economic growth across the EU is stagnant. These are not things to be celebrated.
Salaries are lower and taxes are significantly higher. Take your pick, but I’d rather take the American approach of a more dynamic job market.
I wouldn’t want to deal with low GDP growth, public strikes (see France) and little ability to build wealth.
Parents have to pay for university in Europe unless they are poor. And while there are no fees, the costs are typically between 30k and 100k per child.
edit: In Germany. I‘m German and I have studied there. I should know.
edit2: Someone said this comment could be interpreted as the cost per year which is not the case. This is the total cost.
When I first joined a US startup, they said "you can take unlimited PTO -- we suggest starting with a week per year"... I negotiated that up to the five weeks that are standard here in Denmark.
That is blowing my mind 2 weeks is generally considers standard for white collar work in the US, but companies that have unlimited PTO have a higher tolerance in my experience. I take off 5 weeks a year. I found that taking off a week a quarter and then whatever random emergency days was just right for me. It's why once I experienced unlimited PTO I never went back.
For unlimited PTO, I always like to ask “what are the median number of days taken?”
If they don’t know, that’s a red flag. Id expect it to be about 20-25 if it also includes sick leave. 30-40 means people really take the policy seriously.
Also, I'm amazed at the very idea of having a specific number of available sick days which I understand is the standard in the US. How on Earth is that something that is expected to be planned and accounted for by the employee? How can one "run out of" sick days? How do I see stories about US workers "donating" their unused sick leave days to a colleague with cancer or other long illness?
I'm too lazy to look up the details, but here in Spain the rules are something like no pay for the first 1–3 days of continued sick leave (if not a work accident, in which case you are paid from day 1), followed by a partial payment per day off (40% of base rate?) with gradual increase as the sick leave is prolonged (15 days maybe?) with the payment being gradually reimbursed to the employer by Social Security, I think up to 75% of the employee's base rate. Businesses may of course choose to top it up from their own purse.
Other than the business legitimately suspecting abuse of sick leave, the only special case breaks into effect when sick leave exceeds 365 continuous days, at which point long-term disability may be considered.
I cannot say how dystopic the idea of having limited sick days sounds to me. I am someone who very rarely gets sick, so I very rarely need to call in sick, but I simply know I am protected if I need to as a basic right. And some years ago I did have to make use of it unexpectedly (of course!).
Through no fault of my own I was involved in a traffic accident over a weekend which resulted in, among other minor injuries, a severe traumatic brain injury which could have killed me or left me disabled if it weren't for the emergency brain surgery I received. I spent a week in the ICU, another week in the main hospital wing, months of rehabilitation, and around 10 months of "sick leave" until I was able to work again. I was decently paid this whole period and at no point did I have to worry about losing my job (nor about "medical bills" of course!), being able to fully focus on myself and making a full recovery. I can only imagine how awful it could have been had I not had these basic protective rights as a worker and a citizen.
I've had three or four, it's honestly hard to count at this point, mental health crisises with associated sickleave of varying durations. Living in Europe that has been "fine". Judging by what I read I'd presumably be homeless and destitute in the USA.
"Sick days" means the company will pay you for that number of days missed being ill, if you are ill for longer then you will have to make a claim against your short term disability insurance and long term disability after that. So it's kinda like Spain except you get paid for the first 1-3 days (namely the "sick days" from your company) and then get paid in full eventually cutting down to 60% by the insurance.
The even crazier part is maternity leave, or the lack of it.
The US government requires that women who have been at their job for more than one year get 12 weeks of unpaid time off. But many people can't afford to not be paid, so they don't take the full amount.
Women who have been at their job for less than one year legally get 0 days off.
Less than 25% of US women have any type of paid maternity leave.
Are the salaries really lower because people take more holiday or pay taxes?
Also, vacation days are not always used for fancy instagram post holiday. As random as life is, there are non-medical emergencies that one needs to attend to occasionally. Being able to see family is another one. Not everyone has their parents located within 1 hour driving distance.
My personal preference is to work as contractor and charge only for the days when I work. It takes away the feeling that the employer (or client) has a full control of your life and can dictate whether you will take 4 or 5 days off within a year or try to guilt trip you into working over weekends for no proper reason.
The point of vacation days is that they are fully paid by the employer. Unpaid time off usually isn't a problem (depends on the type of work of course), as long as the employer can plan around it (e.g. I currently work 4 days a week at 20% pay cut at a German company).
A lot of these comments are saying they get sick days. I’m a senior dev in the US and only one company I’ve worked at in 24 years has given me sick days. One company justified the combined bucket of vacation / sick days by saying it’s more fair to employees that have chronic illness because they don’t have to tell anyone. One company only gave 10 days total (vacation and sick) until you had been there 5 years.
My current company gives me 20 days (combined vacation and sick) but we only get 6 paid holidays.
And in the US they have a new racket that's even worse. They provide "unlimited paid time off." However, it has to all be approved by your manager. So now, instead of saying "I still have three PTO days left for this year, so I guess I'll take them this week," you have to beg your manager, so in reality, people end up taking fewer days.
> I feel vacation days are just a basic requirement for happiness, whereas being rich maybe isnt
Not only that, they are a requirement to make a good worker, that consequently make a good company. If you burn out your employees you fall behind schedule pretty quickly, so you have to rely on high turnover, which isn't a great option either.
Take the example of Japan
With a new law taking effect in April 2019 requiring employees who are due 10 days or more of paid vacation to take at least five days off per year
Working too much can have tremendous social consequences
Japan has long had a reputation for being one of the most overworked countries in the world. The term karoshi, or death by overwork, emerged in the 1990s when an increasing number of Japanese professionals were dying from heart attacks and strokes. Recent years have seen an epidemic of suicide, in part because of work-related stress: of 30,000 suicides in 2011, 10,000 were believed to be related to overwork, according to the police.
Burn out in Europe is still omnipresent and rising these days. This includes Germany, the 'chosen child' every proponent points at in these discussions. A few weeks off barely makes a dent in this and vacation days / time off hasn't been that noticeably different since the 70s/80s.
>Japan
That's just a law that pushes them to use it and keeps companies from going 'ah yeah difficult'. It's barely anything when work culture chains employees down to the whims of employers, or risking to be seen as dysfunctional for trying to get out of that 'I belong to my company' trap.
Surprise, that's the same culture that exists in most EU-countries. Just less hardcore.
It depends greatly on the job. I have a fairly typical tech job in the US and have about a month of paid time off in total. Most white collar work is roughly the same, unless the company is managed by assholes.
Retail, service industry, and blue collar work is very different, though. Time off is not always guaranteed, and sick days are not always paid.
Hmm, housing in Europe is more expensive than in the US, especially per square meter. Not needing to drive a car is a preference and Americans clearly don't have the same one, it's not an economic advantage for most, and cars in US are cheaper to own. From my vacation experience groceries etc in Europe are much more expensive.
I mean they have disposable income measures that account for all that as well as welfare programs. In the end disposable incomes in the US make half of the first world look like third world:
I’ve been a software engineer for around 8 years and have had 5 different employers. One (Allstate) allowed us to buy more than the 15 vacation days, and gave us a few sick days I believe. They upped you to 20 after the first year, which is somewhat common in my experience. But no other job I’ve had, including 2 startups, gave sick days.
Microsoft, motherfucking Microsoft, starts you off at 15 days of PTO per year. I’m not really sure why people are itching to work there.
A smaller but still significant percentage of these still receive an allotment of "sick days", and if they exceed them (or have a job without them) just get fired.
> Here in Germany, I get 30 vacation days per calendar year, plus any sick days, and thats fairly normal.
Sick days are fairly normal, but "30 vacation days" is not. Only bigCo/large places offer 30(some offered 35 days too). Usual is 25(state normal) with +1-2 days extra at most places. However, sick leave is godsend, no denying.
For context UK can commonly have 20 to 30 working days and that won't count public holidays (which depend on the country, and should be around 9-11 days which includes new year's, xmas).
I was born and educated in Scotland, worked in the UK for a decade or so, then moved to the US and worked for big tech for 15 years while living in the US and becoming a US citizen. I then chose to move back to Scotland, where I continue to work for the same US big tech company but get paid UK wages with UK employment benefits. So, I've lived significant portions of my life on both sides.
Here in the UK, I get 29 days paid vacation plus ten or so (not sure) public holidays. If I am sick on vacation, I can claim those days as sick days and regain the vacation time. Edit: plus, my contract is for 35 hours per week whereas in the US it was 40.
Regarding money, I am doing the same job that I was doing in the US (same team etc.) but took, what was at the time, a 25% reduction in gross salary. However, by the time you add in the higher taxes, my take home pay (from my salary - my stock awards are the same) is about 40% lower than it was in the US.
Now, I am nearing 50, my corporate career progression is plateauing/settled (by choice, btw) and I have a teenage daughter. A big reason for coming back to Scotland was so she could be educated here and experience European life and culture during her formative years. The other big reason was to have a better work-life balance. I have so much non-work time here, I can actually pursue non-work interests; whereas my US work colleagues seem to always be Slacking and "checking in" while they are on vacation; never seeming to have an identity beyond their job.
I have also lost 13kg (29lb) in weight.
For us techies, the US is the place to get rich, but, in my experience, there are significant lifestyle compromises that you must make in order to do so.
Edit: I was curious about the numbers, so I did a little arithmetic to work out the hourly wage I earned in the US and the hourly wage I earn here in the UK, taking into consideration the vacation days.
My UK gross per hour wage is between 11% and 15% lower than my US salary, depending on the (volatile) exchange rate. Of course, UK tax is much higher (my marginal rate is 49%). So, the difference in take-home pay is more than that.
I work in a major tech company and never check email outside work hours, which I cap at 40 hours a week. I never work weekends, never check work during weekends or vacations.
I make much more than my European peers, have a better car, better weather and bigger house. I have 25 days of paid vacation. While this is better than the US average, I don't know a single person in my friends group wanting to trade the US for Europe, including my Europe-born friends.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I like how you put it. To me American culture is a bit too obsessed with wealth and their economy operates in a very dehumanised way. I'd never want my children to grow up with such "values" around them.
It has been shown that you need around 14 days of interrupted rest to recover from stress etc.
The European laws are not some random thing we made up because we are lazy. It is to ensure workers are well rested and ready for a new working year. Hence in long term it will also benefit employers.
Some personal anecdata: I notice an immediate difference when I come back after a long vacation. The first 2-3 months I work at top efficiency, get probably done twice as much as I would do any other month.
> The European laws are not some random thing we made up because we are lazy.
In the case of the UK, much of the working hours, weekends, time off for bank holidays etc were hard-won agreements and rights from the Industrial Revolution era to the 20th century. The UK led the charge with many of these things too
I wish more people understood this. We had basically slave labour, workhouses, horrific factories etc
Sort of the same in France, or at least the employer is largely pushed to do so. If you don't take 12 consecutive days of vacations between May and October (among other conditions), you get 2 extra days of vacations, for free. It's called 'jours de fractionnement'
I think you have this backwards, it was explained to me that the employer cannot refuse a consecutive vacation of up to 2 weeks, not that the employee has an obligation to take it as such.
> If that was true Europe would have the highest productivity of the world, but it doesn't.
Depends on how you measure productivity. Per hours worked, the top 10 most productive countries is almost only European. Per capita the results are different.
Weird remark, but anyway; long term doesn't have to be 'great'. It can just be very long running companies. My company is 30 years old. I would say long term means something in that regard and there tons of mum and pop type places that are quite old. My old-aunts company was created in 1945 and still does very well today. Maybe we have less 'trillion$ or quit' mentality? I am happy if all my colleagues get a million euros a year for the rest of their life in my company; we don't need to be the biggest or greatest, we just need to be provide stuff people value and make money so we all can live.
There are companies in Europe that are older than the US. I do sincerely think that “long term” is a viable time frame when talking about European companies. When companies grow too large the often fold. So size is not a good measure of long term sustainability.
It amazes me how few of these comments are about neighbors. I'm a Software Engineer as well, but most people are not.
The EU system helps ensure you're not surrounded by people made entirely miserable by their wage slavery. Who would want to be surrounded by miserable fucks?
I live in the US state with the highest median income: Maryland. I feel lucky to have pursued a career here because I didn't grow up here and I didn't know much about Maryland beforehand.
I now feel as though I couldn't live elsewhere within the US. I was surrounded by exhausted, overworked, miserable people growing up in NJ and I see so much less misery here even though I interact with people from many different socioeconomic backgrounds; up and down the ladder.
I‘ve been to the US for a long vacation (4,5 weeks or with traveltime and rest day before and after a whole month). I was able to do this because I have 35 days of vacation (a bonus program from my employer, stay more then x years and your vacation days increase. I have the maximum after 7 years) While I was traveling through south California and Arizona I dreamed how awesome it would be to live here and be able to visit more awesome sites without a 11-13h flight and all the other costs. Then I realized: If I would live and work here I might not get the vacation days I‘m used to, to do all these things. Bubble bursted for the time being. Or are there exceptions? I also include a normal weekly hour rate. I work 40h a week and can be very flexible with these times.
I get ~28 vacation days per year in the US, and I've only been with my company for 5 years. It's going to heavily depend on your industry and level of experience. Even outside of vacation I also have a pretty relaxed work/life balance. If I want to visit family for 2 weeks but not take a bunch of vacation my boss isn't going to care if I work half days remote the whole time.
Ok nice to hear that it is possible ;) See with the overall generalization one thinks in Europe we are constantly on holiday and in the US the people work 50-60 hours a week and have to count the days until the next vacation.
While you might be able to find a good company that offers a lot of vacation (relatively compared to other US firms), culture is ultimately the biggest roadblock for people actually taking the time they need. I've worked at many places that have "unlimited time off" but in reality people worked more on average because it can be difficult to negotiate that time off with your manager.
Everyone starts to compare quality of live and salaries in America vs. Europe.
But you are missing the biggest point! Not everyone is working in IT. And a ton of people do not make $200k+/year.
We're in a group that is very well paid. But most are not. And for them European vacation policies or a social system that doesn't ruin you when you are ill are a big difference.
Everone working it IT is speaking from within an ivory tower.
Regardless of what you think, in the best path is being an eu citizen, work in us(some high paying job like IT) for 5-10 years, return in eu with huge cash, buy a home, work some more chill years for minimal pension and happily retire. Eu is nice to retire if you are eu citizen and have enough cash(by either working some years in us or remotely for us conpanies but a bit less pay)
This is currently what my wife and I are doing. We're both American citizens, but we're 2 years from naturalization in the Netherlands. Through rental properties we've invested in here we're super close to FIRE. I took all my FAANG bucks and invested here, I'm literally just working my job to get naturalization + partial pension
How would you go about paying tax in Europe while in the US? The European countries I'm familiar with will not consider you a tax resident while living abroad, so they won't allow you to pay taxes.
That's perhaps true at tech wage levels. I think it's less true as you move down the ladder, where things like American health costs, college costs, etc, eat into things.
Anecdote time, but I moved from a decent (non-FAANG) tech salary in the US to a (locally) good salary in Norway, and feel better off as a result. In outright terms my salary took a huge hit, but there are so many little things in the US that eat up your money you don't realize over time.
And the difference gets even more stark if you have children.
Social mobility is also a lot higher in the Western EU. I moved with my wife to the Netherlands 3 years ago. I was working a FAANG job, I took a 30% pay cut (after factoring taxes, etc). But the flip side is that the relative salary of a global tech worker in the Netherlands is MUCH higher than the average. My wife and I now have 5 separate rental properties now and growing, something we could only dream of doing in the Bay Area unless one of us hit the startup lottery.
Of course I could have worked remotely for a similar pay cut and bought a bunch of rental properties in the Midwest or something, but instead we're living in a vibrant international city and have enough cash flow to pay our bills.
This is what I don't get about the US system. You can get paid a lot of money, but it is unthinkable for someone with a good job in America to not send their kids to college, which costs a heck of a lot of money. 2.5 kids is going to cost many years of earnings to put through college, and you don't even know what amount that is since the price is flying away.
In Norway you can have 10 kids and all they have to do is be diligent about doing their homework, and they will get into university.
If pay is the only concern, why not just take up contract work and refuse benefits to get the most pay? Ignoring the other variables at play, such as cost of living and benefits, and only focusing on pay is foolish.
I switched to freelance earlier this year and now make 6x compared to before. Granted, I was underpaid for the market because I was CTO in a small startup.
Contract work is for when you can take the risks. You also need to have a good network and be able to sell yourself so you have a steady stream of work. Finding new work takes considerable time which you should factor in.
I personally love the freedom right now, but I’m using this as an in-between period until I discover what I really want to focus on.
As an expat who used to work in California and now works in the Netherlands, tax wise it's about the same. With the 30% ruling + a lower overall income I've actually been able to offload a lot of stock and diversify into real estate without being over taxed. So ymmv
The big skewness (difference between the mean and the median) suggests that a lot of wealth is concentrated at the top and that many people are in fact worse off than Europeans.
Readit News
WHAT? Does that count sick days as well, or is that a myth?
Here in Germany, I get 30 vacation days per calendar year, plus any sick days, and thats fairly normal.
Edit: Sure the absolute salaries here are lower, but the cost of living is vastly different and the social support structures and healthcare are different, too. That should definitely be kept in mind.
I dont need to drive my car a lot, because my city is fully walkable/bikeable, and thats not a super rare thing here. There are a lot of factors.
I feel vacation days are just a basic requirement for happiness, whereas being rich maybe isnt
I live in a big European city. You basically don't need a car - pretty much anything within the city is reachable in about 30min, and public transit is comfy.
Also, I have a public transit ticket that allows me to travel the entire country for a year, which only cost about 1000€.
Yes, salaries are lower, but I also don't have to save anything to get my kids through university, or keep emergency funds for health issues.
Also, I can't just get fired without cause. And if I do get laid off, I have 3 months of grace period, plus potentially years of unemployment money.
Also, the government even pays for certain courses so I can find employment again.
The social system in Europe is amazing.
Which causes companies to be very slow in hiring people, because if business turns they have less flexibility. European countries have some of the highest (youth) unemployment rates in the OECD:
* https://data.oecd.org/unemp/youth-unemployment-rate.htm
* https://www.oecd.org/employment/unemployment-rates-oecd-upda...
edit: In Germany. I‘m German and I have studied there. I should know.
edit2: Someone said this comment could be interpreted as the cost per year which is not the case. This is the total cost.
If they don’t know, that’s a red flag. Id expect it to be about 20-25 if it also includes sick leave. 30-40 means people really take the policy seriously.
I'm too lazy to look up the details, but here in Spain the rules are something like no pay for the first 1–3 days of continued sick leave (if not a work accident, in which case you are paid from day 1), followed by a partial payment per day off (40% of base rate?) with gradual increase as the sick leave is prolonged (15 days maybe?) with the payment being gradually reimbursed to the employer by Social Security, I think up to 75% of the employee's base rate. Businesses may of course choose to top it up from their own purse.
Other than the business legitimately suspecting abuse of sick leave, the only special case breaks into effect when sick leave exceeds 365 continuous days, at which point long-term disability may be considered.
I cannot say how dystopic the idea of having limited sick days sounds to me. I am someone who very rarely gets sick, so I very rarely need to call in sick, but I simply know I am protected if I need to as a basic right. And some years ago I did have to make use of it unexpectedly (of course!).
Through no fault of my own I was involved in a traffic accident over a weekend which resulted in, among other minor injuries, a severe traumatic brain injury which could have killed me or left me disabled if it weren't for the emergency brain surgery I received. I spent a week in the ICU, another week in the main hospital wing, months of rehabilitation, and around 10 months of "sick leave" until I was able to work again. I was decently paid this whole period and at no point did I have to worry about losing my job (nor about "medical bills" of course!), being able to fully focus on myself and making a full recovery. I can only imagine how awful it could have been had I not had these basic protective rights as a worker and a citizen.
You just run out of paid sick days. The employer will just drop you.
The US government requires that women who have been at their job for more than one year get 12 weeks of unpaid time off. But many people can't afford to not be paid, so they don't take the full amount.
Women who have been at their job for less than one year legally get 0 days off.
Less than 25% of US women have any type of paid maternity leave.
Also, vacation days are not always used for fancy instagram post holiday. As random as life is, there are non-medical emergencies that one needs to attend to occasionally. Being able to see family is another one. Not everyone has their parents located within 1 hour driving distance.
My personal preference is to work as contractor and charge only for the days when I work. It takes away the feeling that the employer (or client) has a full control of your life and can dictate whether you will take 4 or 5 days off within a year or try to guilt trip you into working over weekends for no proper reason.
The point of vacation days is that they are fully paid by the employer. Unpaid time off usually isn't a problem (depends on the type of work of course), as long as the employer can plan around it (e.g. I currently work 4 days a week at 20% pay cut at a German company).
My current company gives me 20 days (combined vacation and sick) but we only get 6 paid holidays.
Not only that, they are a requirement to make a good worker, that consequently make a good company. If you burn out your employees you fall behind schedule pretty quickly, so you have to rely on high turnover, which isn't a great option either.
Take the example of Japan
With a new law taking effect in April 2019 requiring employees who are due 10 days or more of paid vacation to take at least five days off per year
Working too much can have tremendous social consequences
Japan has long had a reputation for being one of the most overworked countries in the world. The term karoshi, or death by overwork, emerged in the 1990s when an increasing number of Japanese professionals were dying from heart attacks and strokes. Recent years have seen an epidemic of suicide, in part because of work-related stress: of 30,000 suicides in 2011, 10,000 were believed to be related to overwork, according to the police.
Burn out in Europe is still omnipresent and rising these days. This includes Germany, the 'chosen child' every proponent points at in these discussions. A few weeks off barely makes a dent in this and vacation days / time off hasn't been that noticeably different since the 70s/80s.
>Japan
That's just a law that pushes them to use it and keeps companies from going 'ah yeah difficult'. It's barely anything when work culture chains employees down to the whims of employers, or risking to be seen as dysfunctional for trying to get out of that 'I belong to my company' trap.
Surprise, that's the same culture that exists in most EU-countries. Just less hardcore.
Retail, service industry, and blue collar work is very different, though. Time off is not always guaranteed, and sick days are not always paid.
I mean they have disposable income measures that account for all that as well as welfare programs. In the end disposable incomes in the US make half of the first world look like third world:
https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm (click table, and pick gross including transfers)
You can also see % of that spent on housing, US is lower than most EU countries
Microsoft, motherfucking Microsoft, starts you off at 15 days of PTO per year. I’m not really sure why people are itching to work there.
Sick days are fairly normal, but "30 vacation days" is not. Only bigCo/large places offer 30(some offered 35 days too). Usual is 25(state normal) with +1-2 days extra at most places. However, sick leave is godsend, no denying.
plus another ~10-15 days of National holidays
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Does this include public holidays? Or do you have public holidays?
For context UK can commonly have 20 to 30 working days and that won't count public holidays (which depend on the country, and should be around 9-11 days which includes new year's, xmas).
Depending on the state there are ten to thirteen public holidays (but some invariably fall on the weekend).
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Here in the UK, I get 29 days paid vacation plus ten or so (not sure) public holidays. If I am sick on vacation, I can claim those days as sick days and regain the vacation time. Edit: plus, my contract is for 35 hours per week whereas in the US it was 40.
Regarding money, I am doing the same job that I was doing in the US (same team etc.) but took, what was at the time, a 25% reduction in gross salary. However, by the time you add in the higher taxes, my take home pay (from my salary - my stock awards are the same) is about 40% lower than it was in the US.
Now, I am nearing 50, my corporate career progression is plateauing/settled (by choice, btw) and I have a teenage daughter. A big reason for coming back to Scotland was so she could be educated here and experience European life and culture during her formative years. The other big reason was to have a better work-life balance. I have so much non-work time here, I can actually pursue non-work interests; whereas my US work colleagues seem to always be Slacking and "checking in" while they are on vacation; never seeming to have an identity beyond their job.
I have also lost 13kg (29lb) in weight.
For us techies, the US is the place to get rich, but, in my experience, there are significant lifestyle compromises that you must make in order to do so.
Edit: I was curious about the numbers, so I did a little arithmetic to work out the hourly wage I earned in the US and the hourly wage I earn here in the UK, taking into consideration the vacation days.
My UK gross per hour wage is between 11% and 15% lower than my US salary, depending on the (volatile) exchange rate. Of course, UK tax is much higher (my marginal rate is 49%). So, the difference in take-home pay is more than that.
I make much more than my European peers, have a better car, better weather and bigger house. I have 25 days of paid vacation. While this is better than the US average, I don't know a single person in my friends group wanting to trade the US for Europe, including my Europe-born friends.
The European laws are not some random thing we made up because we are lazy. It is to ensure workers are well rested and ready for a new working year. Hence in long term it will also benefit employers.
Some personal anecdata: I notice an immediate difference when I come back after a long vacation. The first 2-3 months I work at top efficiency, get probably done twice as much as I would do any other month.
In the case of the UK, much of the working hours, weekends, time off for bank holidays etc were hard-won agreements and rights from the Industrial Revolution era to the 20th century. The UK led the charge with many of these things too
I wish more people understood this. We had basically slave labour, workhouses, horrific factories etc
Do you have sources on that?
My anecdotal experience is that I need at least 3 weeks.
I know this to be true in Switzerland, and only in banking. Where it has to do with detecting fraud in your absence.
If that was true Europe would have the highest productivity of the world, but it doesn't.
Depends on how you measure productivity. Per hours worked, the top 10 most productive countries is almost only European. Per capita the results are different.
Maybe productivity should not be the metric we should strive for?
I lived/worked in the US and Europe and my quality of life and overall happiness was way higher in Europe even if my salary was higher in the US.
Dead Comment
Maybe is not as bad as you think?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...
But as a worker, do I care where companies have their headquarters? All major tech companies have offices in Europe anyway
The EU system helps ensure you're not surrounded by people made entirely miserable by their wage slavery. Who would want to be surrounded by miserable fucks?
I live in the US state with the highest median income: Maryland. I feel lucky to have pursued a career here because I didn't grow up here and I didn't know much about Maryland beforehand.
I now feel as though I couldn't live elsewhere within the US. I was surrounded by exhausted, overworked, miserable people growing up in NJ and I see so much less misery here even though I interact with people from many different socioeconomic backgrounds; up and down the ladder.
But you are missing the biggest point! Not everyone is working in IT. And a ton of people do not make $200k+/year.
We're in a group that is very well paid. But most are not. And for them European vacation policies or a social system that doesn't ruin you when you are ill are a big difference.
Everone working it IT is speaking from within an ivory tower.
The whole package is what matters.
We work to live, not live to work.
And the difference gets even more stark if you have children.
Of course I could have worked remotely for a similar pay cut and bought a bunch of rental properties in the Midwest or something, but instead we're living in a vibrant international city and have enough cash flow to pay our bills.
In Norway you can have 10 kids and all they have to do is be diligent about doing their homework, and they will get into university.
I get 25 days per year.
What's the minimum wage in the USA?
And, yes, if you're a full-time minimum wage employee in the UK you get a minimum of 28 days paid holiday.
Contract work is for when you can take the risks. You also need to have a good network and be able to sell yourself so you have a steady stream of work. Finding new work takes considerable time which you should factor in.
I personally love the freedom right now, but I’m using this as an in-between period until I discover what I really want to focus on.
Contract work is a fundamentally different proposition and equating it to employment is foolish.
But in France you get something out of your taxes
I'll stick with the health care, education, paid vacation and sick leave, lower crime rates, lower incarceration rates, zero school shootings, etc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...
The big skewness (difference between the mean and the median) suggests that a lot of wealth is concentrated at the top and that many people are in fact worse off than Europeans.