[dalys]

I live in Sweden and make $70k / year. Full stack dev. I was recently in the Bay area and the absolutely only thing that is better is the weather. Cities are dirty and filled with homeless people. Infrastructure (roads, bike lanes, walking paths, Internet, 4G, electricity, water) is all worse. Standard of living feels more like eastern Europe in 80s. Traffic is insane. Getting around by walking felt really unsafe. Public transport is pretty bad and outdated. I wouldn`t want to sacrifice the lifestyle we can enjoy for 3 times the money. Free health care is only one tiny thing. For example we just had a baby for which we were invoiced around 130 usd. I wonder how much that would be in the US. Now my wife will be on paid maternity leave for around 10 months, and then I will also take around 10-11 paid months off. I wonder how many dads do that in the US? I would guess the ones that asked for it got fired. After summer, if the corona situation is ok, me and my wife will be off together with the baby for around 3-4 weeks. Not a problem since my wife has 5 weeks of vacation and I have 6-9 (7 for 2021). My sister and her husband are doing the same and together with my parents we are planning a long trip to Turkey. And you accrue vacation days during parental leave. Right now I am also thinking about taking 6 months off as unpaid leave of absence to start my own company, as is my legal right.

$1.5k / month was my total cost of living as single! That was owning my own condo with 15 minutes bike ride to Stockholm city center. The rest I mostly used for vacation trips and did 4-5 (one week each) every year. No need to save for unexpected health care bills, your unborned kids college education, grandmas retirement home, that car you need to buy to commute 1 hour to your job etc.

That 3x salary comes with a really high price! In reality I would probably not make more than 120k / year in the US though. With that said, I can understand that some people really enjoy spending most of their lives working for the man, and getting a high salary and skipping out on vacations and work life balance. But not for me.

[propogandist]

Thanks for sharing this.

I work for a big multinational co that grants me 15 days off in a year, but bigco does not celebrate most holidays. The next holiday we will have, that does not count towards PTO after New Years Day, is July 4, 2021... 5-6 weeks off sounds amazing.

I've got colleagues in EU, China and other places and they all seem to have better benefits (mandated by the govt) compared to how things are in the states. US corporations seem to only see humans as resources.