My understanding of bigger salaries outside the UK is that they are based on longer working hours, with very little focus on quality of life outside work. This may only apply to the US, but in any case I’ll always personally consider off-work time a very precious requirement.
probably almost four to eight weeks more per year than the average British or European programmer. In the EU and UK most countries have about six weeks of mandatory paid time off per year, and strict limits on overtime work.
Anecdotally from my own experience in the US I'd say Americans work probably about 20% more hours annually. Even people who had comparable vacation would often only take two weeks, and weekly hours seemed to be closer to 40-45 than the 35-38 that's common in Europe.
Around the 2000 years and the dot com boom, When I worked at a very large and well-known US software company, on-site for an external (German company) partner, their campus parking lots filled up around 9-10 am and emptied at 4 pm. Long midday breaks in the (several) restaurants on campus, or the sports building, many driving off-site for eating in some nearby city (many to choose from on the SF Bay Area peninsula).
True, the Americans didn't get much vacation, when I and some German colleagues went skiing over that long fall weekend (forgot what holiday it was) the resort was suddenly empty exactly at the end of the holiday, while we Germans stayed a day longer.
However, during regular hours it's pretty casual. My job involved traveling to many IT companies all over the country, I don't think the insane hours are anywhere near normal apart from some very few companies and not for long. The best you will get is people pretending to work - often enough I saw lots of "office golf" and web browsing or being out for coffee breaks, lots more than people actually working. That was before the wave of remote work so I think I saw the "real work". I'm fine with it, I think that's sane and reasonable for these kinds of jobs.
On the other hand, what I saw from low-level service jobs was really bad. It seemed to me that those employees do have it hard and are under constant supervision with little authority to do anything or to use their brain, just follow the script and call a supervisor if any actual decisions have to be made, and they really have to work those hours.
