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 Public transport is pretty bad and outdated.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.

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.

US pay is certainly higher for the top 5% earners than virtually any other country's top 5% earners. But the litmus test of a country's system is whether you'd want to live there, not knowing what person or in what family you'd be born to. If you know you'll be a top 5% earner, of course the US is a better place than say Sweden. If you don't, the US doesn't look so hot.

Second, there's work/life balance, for example you can look at annual workhours and see there's a 350 hour gap between the US and Sweden: https://clockify.me/assets/images/working-hours/oecd-hours-w...

350 hours is equivalent to 8.75 weeks (or more than 2 months) of 8 hour, 5-day workweeks. That's a massive difference.

Second, Sweden has free education. Being a top 5% earner in the US sometimes comes easy, but often times you're looking at medschool, lawschool or CS or whatever, that can set you back anywhere from 30k to 250k, with 7% average student loan interest rates.

Stuff like this can put a massive weight on your shoulders from age 18 til 38 or so, constantly climbing a corporate ladder, working crazy hours, and paying off a massive debt. All the while fearing that an economic crisis or some kind of disability leading to unemployment, can ruin you. In a country like Sweden there's no such weight on your shoulders, subsidised, and a massive social safety net. Quality of life is quite stable, and you can both very much enjoy student life, and your life right after, all the way til old age, with a healthy work/life balance.

You also don't have to live in a city that you share with an extremely poor underclass, homelessness, crime, drug addiction, while paying a million for a single bedroom.

Of course I'm not saying everyone in tech is working 80 hours and getting crushed by debt while working in an overpriced city with some minor dystopian undertones. But when looking at these things, Sweden and the US are certainly on opposite sides of the spectrum. And it must be taken into account when looking at pay.

I'd love to move to the US for some time, the natural parks are amazing, I like the culture and the vibe. But work/life balance, the lack of safety net if you're unlucky and the general state of the country for many of its people, are repelling me. I've never thought of pay as something that attracts me to the US, it's really not worth it for me because I'm not lacking anything (although I do make about $100k equivalent in western Europe, but even at much lower salaries when I was younger I loved it here).

70k is according to my anecdotes low for Stockholm, and not something that I’d expect a senior to accept. Senior front end developers go for about 90k. Becoming a contractor is the way to go if you want decent pay (175k+).