In France there is employee taxes and employer taxes. You discuss before employee taxes, but after employer taxes (which is about 50% of the salary before employee taxes). If you're on a French payroll the amount is written on your payslip, but most people don't even notice it.
At the end of the day it doesn't really matter if it's an employer tax or an employee tax, the employer spends some amount of money and the employee gets a portion home. But the discussion never includes employer taxes.
“After tax” in the US means after the employee pays their own share of various income taxes. The portion of those taxes paid by the employer are not discussed (in salary discussions).
Either way, the point stands - for cross-border salary discussions, you need to consider the “fully loaded” cost of an employee, not just net salary. You also have to consider non-cash benefits and costs (high US salaries offset by high health care costs, etc).
Once you go fully remote you don't really need employment contracts either - in Europe opening some sort of legal entity and invoicing your salary as an independent contractor will be more profitable and more flexible.
I have; last time when I was looking for a job, some employers (and mostly recruiters) asked me what I'd like to earn per month after taxes.
I'm sure there's some shuffling they would end up doing when it comes to wages, stock options (not really a thing), transportation, and other benefits.
I'd never discuss that with a recruiter, because that would involve a discussion about how I conduct my personal finances well beyond just the salary and other benefits... E.g. additional pension contributions I make, or investments I make would affect it.
I'm sure you have - but not after income taxes. All taxes that are taken before you get your gross (before income tax) pay, is typically what is quoted in Euerope.
E.g. My employer pays X1.25 for my "before tax" salary of X because there is 25% payroll taxes/fees.
I pay 35% taxes on that, so my net is 0.65x. Is X "before"or "after" taxes here? It's after payroll taxes and similar deductions, but before income taxes (which I pay myself).
As one data point, people never discus before-tax salaries in my home country (Croatia), it's always after-taxes and all other mandatory deductions. I believe the same holds true for at least several other EU countries from the region.
by "people never discuss" you mean the negotiation between the employee and employer is based on after tax salary, or do you mean casual conversations with friends? I haven't seen discussing after tax salary at all during interviewing process in the 4 countries I applied for jobs and got offers (Slovakia, Czechia, Switzerland, Denmark).
Officially, on the employment contract, the salary is shown before-tax, but after mandatory pension and healthcare deductions.
However, in the negotiations, in casual conversation, and when you're hearing someone talking about their salary in the media, it's always discussed after taxes. Most people have no idea how much tax (or health insurance) they're actually paying.
In Finland, I usually hear people talk about salaries before taxes and less often after taxes. For example my union has a yearly salary survey and publish results in before taxes salaries. But since it's so confusing, you usually see "brutto" ("gross", before taxes) and "netto" ("net", after taxes) being discussed when talking about salaries.
How do they know what your tax rate is? Especially in the context of "work from anywhere" as in OP, employees can have a wide variety of tax situations.
The tax rate is flat and there are no deductions. There are no local relative taxes (as in a percentage of your income), everything is in absolute values.
And if you're working from another country, then you're a fiscal resident in that country and you have to pay taxes there. But in that case you'd be a contractor or own a company, so that's a totally different story.
At the end of the day it doesn't really matter if it's an employer tax or an employee tax, the employer spends some amount of money and the employee gets a portion home. But the discussion never includes employer taxes.