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0 pointssingle_identity3y ago0 comments

First, 100k EUR is _before_ tax which I believe you might be confusing here. After tax you get maybe 50-ish % of that so you end up with something like 50k EUR per year. In no European country that would be enough to "buy the house" and even more so in Germany.

Secondly, I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts here. What if you:

* Lived in the EU

* Being salaried 100k EUR (which is probably around 90th percentile)

* Worked for a _global_ company with a _global_ product deployed on a _global_ market with _global_ competition

And now some of your colleagues are from the US and you:

* have the same responsibilities as they do

* have the same skill-set needed for given position as they do

* have the same impact, or potential for it thereof, as they do

* have to go through the same agony of being and staying among top performers

And yet your US colleagues are salaried 2x-3x as much as you are. Without taking RSUs into a picture because that's a very rare thing to have in European companies.

What are your thoughts about this? Do you attribute this difference solely to the cost of living?

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fxtentacle3y ago

The offer I linked to was literally a "buy the house with monthly installments and no upfront payment" offer. So yes, you can "buy the house" if you can afford those 1900€ per month in addition to food and heating.

Also, with 2 kids and 2 adults out of which only 1 is working, you'll get heavy tax deductions, so I'd expect an effective tax rate of around 15%. That 100k€ gross will turn into 85k€ after taxes. Deduct another 10k€ annually for top-tier health insurance for everyone, 1900€ per month = 23k€ annually for the house and that leaves you with about 4300€ each month to spend on food, clothing and heating.

This might be just me, but I think if you pay people so that they can have a very nice lifestyle where they live, that's a "good salary". If the absolute $ number is higher in San Francisco than it is in Germany, then you either need to pay them more to match the lifestyle, or maybe hire in cheaper markets.

Germany in general seems to be very remote friendly. Many larger companies even have programs where you can go on a work-vacation to a tourist resort and they'll organize a co-working space and necessary permits. I guess that's why you see salaries equalize more throughout Germany while in the US the regional differences are quite strong.

single_identityOP3y ago

> so I'd expect an effective tax rate of around 15%. That 100k€ gross will turn into 85k€ after taxes.

Your calculus is far far from reality so your further reasoning is therefore flawed from the very start. 4-4.5k EUR is probably more realistic.

Moreover, property prices around EU are generally speaking anywhere from 3k EUR to 15k EUR per sqm. For a 100sqm home that's 300k EUR for the cheapest one, 700-800k EUR as a median and more expensive ones over a 1M EUR. Even with the 90-th percentile salary such as 4k EUR per month (after tax), how exactly do you envision buying a home with that sort of prices?

Software engineers are being grossly underpaid in Europe and all this recurring bullshit around housing prices, living costs etc. is just a bullshit that capitalist companies will spread to convince people such as yourself to start considering your colleagues as a "threat" and not just human beings who want to be paid what they are deserved.

My purchasing power, even with the 90-th percentile salary in EU, is _nowhere_ near the purchasing power I'd have with the same skills I have if I had lived in the US and that's where all the discussion can stop. If we take some of the other European countries as an example that gap is going to be even much larger. Purchasing power coefficients are a real thing you know.

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