Ehh if you look at other "modern" countries you see workers being paid half as much. Not to say that the US is any sort of paradise, but there are definitely tradeoffs that favor either direction.
I don't think there is any value in just comparing salaries across countries, but I'm sure you already know this. Make it more interesting by add in life expectancy or something else, salary is just a number that doesn't matter much unless you start including other numbers too.
I'd rather work one year at Amazon than 5 years at a nice European country in a walkable city, and that's how the numbers pan out if you're saving for retirement
I'm guessing you're a US-native then? Where this salary/work obsession seems a lot stronger than around here (South-West Europe).
My impression is that you work in order to do what you really want later, while we tend to focus on getting a job that pays enough to survive + bit more, but still allows us to do the things we want now, rather than later at/around retirement.
Insert story about The Businessman and The Fisherman
You aren't sitting on a beach playing guitar with your friends if you get a tech job in Germany, you're doing the same boring pain-in-the-ass dead-end work either way. Just with less threat of being randomly fired or mistreated, which isn't even particularly intimidating or stressful when you're sitting on an enormous nest egg
Since you avoided the question, I'm guessing I was spot on :)
And I'd guarantee you that someone who worked five years for a average German company definitely has incurred less mental stress than someone working one year for Amazon, on average.
But I also recognize that it's hard to see the difference between the two cultures if you only have the experience of one of them, and the "hard working pays off" system is so heavily ingrained.
How many years are you going to have to save up to retire at $240k/year vs $80k/year, do you think? Would you rather grind 10 months a year until you're too old to do anything but sit around and watch TV, or would you rather grind 12 months a year for 5-10 years and then do whatever you want for the rest of your life?
> This is a discussion about worker pay. Salary is the metric.
Disagree, the discussion is about much more than just a metric of salaries. Even if you consider the discussion to only be about salary, doesn't it matter how much of that salary you have to spend on things like health insurance VS other places? As that'd eat from your salary (or not).
They're being paid half as much but they're much better off because world-class health care and education are effectively free. And if they have a job it's much harder to fire them and leave them twisting in the wind.
This is true in one very specific industry, computer programming. Maybe being a doctor too but HN doesn't cater so much to that crowd. In others, wages are pretty comparable.
It's not even true in programming, unless your comparison point is not "the US tech sector", but specifically "Silicon Valley".
Out here in the rest of the US, tech salaries are still somewhat higher, broadly speaking, than other professions, but they're much lower than they are in SV and related west-coast areas.
And when you're talking about tech worker salaries outside the tech sector, the effect is even stronger.