Indeed... I'm beginning to believe that I exist in an alternate universe (colloquially known as "Europe") where insane software engineering salaries aren't normalised.
Wages in US have higher ceiling. Averages aren't that much different.
This contributes to brain drain - if you are pretty good developer, you aren't really incentived to move to US. If you are one of the best, in US you can earn many times more.
I've worked with (and still work with) many Americans, let me give you an idea.
I get paid 174,000 USD per year
I take 6 weeks off (vacation) per year to sail in the Mediterranean and to SKI in the French and Swiss alps. This is fully paid and it would be highly abnormal if I did not take this time off.
My wife was paid her full salary for 6 months to have a baby. The government would have mandated a minimum payment term if that did not happen.
I never have to worry about healthcare, it's just there and it's available all the time regardless of employment
I never worry about being fired without strong cause, I am protected by strong laws
None of my children have ever participated in an 'active shooter drill'
I went to a top tier University and only paid 3000 GBP per year. The government gave me thousands of pounds without expecting repayment. The government gave me thousands of pounds and said they will write it off if I can't pay it back before 25 years and they won't ask for a single penny if I earn below a certain amount. When they did start taking repayments, it was a small amount extra on top of my income tax. The interest rate is also very low to the point of it not really mattering.
If you live in the UK and have been in your job for less than two years, you don't have the protection from being fired you think you do. Our laws protect you from being fired for discriminatory reasons but not much else
Methinks you watch too much news about the US. Those problems you're alluding to don't affect the vast majority of Americans making $174k+/year, and that's kind of one of the problems we're having right now.
Take my salary down to 50k and everything remains true on that list except my holidays will be at cheap family resorts on the Mediterranean rather than in 5* hotels.
That cannot be said for the average American:
that may struggle with massive medical bills,
lack of strong worker protection,
kids doing active shooter drills, (three people from my clients have had their kids do this in the past few weeks)
maybe 1 week of vacation per year,
Crazy student loans where some people end up paying back thousands but still owing more than when they started - you could argue this is their own fault but the ability to dig yourself into that sort of hole doesn't even exist here.
no law to mandate maternity pay etc etc...
Can you elaborate on some of the news I've watched? I don't understand that reference and I don't often read news out of the US unless its global headline grabbing.
Yep, totally fair about making less money being a problem in the US, and it's a big problem right now in the US where the upper class has a totally different experience than the middle/lower class, but taking your salary down isn't what we were talking about. The point is that, at this income level, the quality of life in the US shoots up substantially, to the point where it matches what you describe, but also isn't on an island in the Atlantic with terrible weather and a lot less geographic diversity. :)
And no, I don't believe for one second that you don't understand "that reference" w/r/t watching too much US news! How else would you know what's going on in the US and misapply it to the upper class?
No, you know exactly what you were referencing, you just didn't know how stratified the social structure is here in the US, so you thought you could apply issues you know affect the middle class to the upper class, when that wasn't actually the case.
It's fine! This is a learning moment, all good. The US has a complex society, partially because we're so big (both geographically and population -- it's a lot easier to run a country when everyone is nearby and there are a lot fewer of you), and now is a good time for you to learn that our problems aren't shared across social levels.
I still don't get the reference. Why don't you just be clear and unambiguous?
I know that access to healthcare isn't a necessarily a given in the US. I know that kids prepare for shooters to enter their schools. I know my friends husband doesn't have the correct level of healthcare(don't know the terminology) for his bowel cancer so now the family is broke, I know what I know because I have worked with Americans for years.
The average American in the midwest can still live a pretty decent life on the 50k. An American making 50k in a major city such as San Francisco or New York City is forced to endure long commutes, but can still make it work, somewhat similar to people who commute to London.
Most of my comments stem from personal experience; the assumption is that you are comparing someone who makes a similar amount of money here.
> I take 6 weeks off (vacation) per year to sail in the Mediterranean and to SKI in the French and Swiss alps. This is fully paid and it would be highly abnormal if I did not take this time off.
Americans differ from you in this aspect, but it's a cultural difference. It is very common for people to take 2-week vacations, and somewhat common for people to take two such vacations per year.
> My wife was paid her full salary for 6 months to have a baby. The government would have mandated a minimum payment term if that did not happen.
Again, America has a cultural aversion to paying such generous benefits. I've seen people take 3 months off after having children. I have also seen new mothers come back to work part-time while transitioning to working full-time over the course of an additional couple months. Overall, it's comparable.
> I never have to worry about healthcare, it's just there and it's available all the time regardless of employment
If you are employed and making 174k in the USA, you are in the same boat: you do not have to worry about healthcare costs as you are covered.
> None of my children have ever participated in an 'active shooter drill'
Elected representatives who are meeting constituents do not get stabbed to death here. Stabbings in general are somewhat uncommon compared to shootings. America is more violent, but it doesn't generally affect people in the wage bracket that we're talking about here. A lot of violence is perpetrated by poor people on other poor people, usually in connection with narcotics.
> I went to a top tier University and only paid 3000 GBP per year. The government gave me thousands of pounds without expecting repayment. The government gave me thousands of pounds and said they will write it off if I can't pay it back before 25 years and they won't ask for a single penny if I earn below a certain amount. When they did start taking repayments, it was a small amount extra on top of my income tax. The interest rate is also very low to the point of it not really mattering.
America has fallen behind the other rich countries in this regard. But America also offers a much larger menu of choices in what kind of school you attend, and what type of experience you have. All that choice comes at a cost, and the high wages for computer science grads makes the increased college costs moot: you can earn it all back without superhuman effort, and student loan burdens rarely cripple the lives of people who get lucrative employment.
The amount of choice available to the American consumer beats anything the UK can offer, hands-down. This is true irrespective of how much you make: this type of variety and plentifulness for everyone is unprecedented outside of the US.
> Elected representatives who are meeting constituents do not get stabbed to death here.
Except Gabby Giffords who got shot in the head. The would be assassin then shot 19 other people at a constituency meeting...... our MP getting killed didn't affect the average person, your MP getting shot lead to 19 other people being shot.
"Giffords was shot in the head during the 2011 Tucson shooting, which occurred at a constituency meeting held in a supermarket parking lot in Casas Adobes, Arizona."
"A man ran up to the crowd and began firing a 9mm pistol with a 33-round magazine,[36][37] hitting 19 people,[38] and killing six"
You're making a lot of excuses for your country by taking a very narrow view of everything I said. I was always told Americans sing the national anthem in the morning at school to brainwash the kids, this clearly worked on you.
> You're making a lot of excuses for your country by taking a very narrow view of everything I said. I was always told Americans sing the national anthem in the morning at school to brainwash the kids, this clearly worked on you.
Way to go ad-hominem here. You have shown that you are not here for any sort of reasonable discussion. Citing shooter drills, national anthems at school and silly comments about me being brainwashed are further proof of your inability to have a reasonable discussion.
Don't feel bad. In the alternate, alternate universe (colloquially known as "the USA outside of Silicon Valley, Seattle & NYC") they aren't normalized either.
Eh, this is not always and everywhere true. I have friends at Google here in London and some of the salary figures I've heard are shockingly low. As in, sub-or-around-100k low. Though admittedly these are people who I'd guess are below, say, L5.
That 'low' salary may put them in the top few percent of the whole country for their age bracket which means they can live quite nice lives. Everything is relative.
