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I got a remote job for a EU company, I'd find it hard to go back to a US-based
47 nixass 63 6/8/2025, 10:49:35 AM businessinsider.com ↗
It’s so much better than the corporate world even as a software developer and even with all the draconian security restrictions. Actually, the restrictions are nearly identical to working at a major bank. The primary reason it’s so much better is the people. The people tend to skew much older with far more experience, they tend to be better educated, and they all must have clearances and IT certifications. That eliminates so much of the entitlement, insecurity, and general stupidity I saw in my peers as a 15 year corporate software developer.
If you have critical skills then a large contractor like Raytheon or McDonnelL Douglas will gladly pay for it. The cost of the clearance is absolutely worth it to fill a position that drives a project forward.
In Germany I make way less, it's true, but I have a much higher quality of life and feeling of security here and I'd never willfully move back to the US. There's more to life than money, as they say...
A favourite fact of mine is that if you're sick when on vacation, you get your vacation days back.
Worker's rights are vastly better in Germany than the US but that is a very low bar to set.
If you work at at a company with strong union presence and Betriebsrat, yes, you will have a good life. That is not the reality for most people though. If you work for a smaller company in some low skilled job, your life will be vastly different.
Social security and worker's right have constantly been attacked politically in the last decades and are chipped away piece by piece. The public health care system has be systematically and purposely weakened to the point that it is close to collapse.
Germany is still one of the better countries to live and work in but not as great as it used to be. But that is true for most countries thanks to the rise of neoliberalism.
Do you think there's benefit to working for an EU company from the US?
However, this article seems like an ad for a single company, where they post a direct link to their careers section and even heap praise on the interview experience, which is unusual unless the person is specifically talking about their career to another prospective employer or to an otherwise "professional" audience.
The obvious drawback is the difference in pay. European salaries are lower for the same job. Probably still lower even relative to real hours worked.
There's a less tangible and harder to quantify benefit of not having to deal with the same kind of job related stress a US worker has to deal with. The boost in quality of life that can't be gleaned from the size of your house or number of cars you own. So it's hard to factor that in when making a data driven comparison.
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Having said that, it doesn't make anything she's said inaccurate in itself, and I would even back up her take. I've worked for and with a few US companies, and ... jeeesh.
I feel the main cultural difference is that people here _presume_ you're doing your best, whereas in the USA people feel like they have to _prove_ they're doing their best.
The US folks were all told to leave immediately.
In the UK they had to give us notice and pay, also negotiate with employee representatives.
> In the US, it can often feel that your work is your identity. My European colleagues take pride in their work and are extremely hard workers, but their job is one facet of their identity.
In a non-office setting, I would sooner introduce myself as an improviser and bouldering enthusiast than an engineer. Although, I am the kind of person who codes to relax, not letting my job take over my identity is my last resistance in this boring dystopia.
edit: forgot a negation which totally changed the meaning of last sentence.
They're both passionate about their work (game devs usually are) but feel like no one at their office share that sentiment. When it's 5Pm, even before deadline, people just leave. During breaks, they rather talk about local football teams than most recent news about their profession.
So that's the other side of the coin
Four weeks (20 days) of vacation is an EU-mandated minimum even if some countries give more. Parental leave varies a lot, but the EU minimum is 14 weeks of maternal and 2 weeks of paternal leave. The concept of "five sick days" or whatever other number doesn't exist in the EU, sick leave policy varies by member state but it's never limited to a few days. At-will employment likewise doesn't exist for normal jobs, there's no firing people on a whim because you don't like their work, and there's no place with less than a month's notice.
Healthcare is a bit different as it couldn't apply to a remote US worker, but still worth mentioning. The EU is very non-monolithic in the organization, quality and culture of healthcare, but each country has some kind of universal coverage model and so you cannot lose healthcare access by losing your job.
I live in Denmark at the moment, and if my company wanted to lay me off without cause, they would have to give me three months notice. I have 6 weeks of vacation (with the option to take more unpaid; this 6 weeks is not including public holidays), private health insurance on top of the public health system through my company, pension both public and private, have no practical restrictions on sick leave, and work 37.5 hours a week (much of which can be done remotely). I have not once been asked to, or needed to work overtime, or be on-call unpaid. When I return home from work, unless I have planned to put a few remote hours in (to reduce my time spent at the office that week), I am neither expected nor required to answer emails or messages.
If I do lose my job, I will still receive a significant portion of my salary for a year, thanks to insurance through my union (I work as a software engineer).
Also 3 months of paid time off seems totally unbelievable.
That the EU laws are synchronized is somewhat irrelevant. Most of this isn't about laws, but what companies are offering.
Had it multiple times, AMA. Actually more in real life, once I was laid off start of the calendar month, which I was not expected to work off either. This is regular employees, top managers get 6 months. US engineers thinking they live the top life, not knowing how exploited they are.
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The things your higher salary gets you can be had _right this instant_ if you took a different job with a (potentially) lower salary. Money doesn't make you feel good, the things money can _get_ you makes you feel good, and they are often free!
It's hard to tell without knowing what she does exactly, but as a white collar worker for a tech company she'll probably be earning similar to other white collar workers in Michigan.
You won't be able to enjoy the same comfort working for a Bulgarian company in Silicon Valley, but this seems like a rather balanced pick.
Also, imagine a woman having a baby and going back to work on Monday, and having to pay a full salary for care.. insane right?? Who needs babies.
But sure, salary difference..
People often forget that freedom of choice in the marketplace is freedom to allow some people to make dumb choices or bad choices. Often times when I hear people complaining about the lack of health care in the US It's because they prioritize short-term gains over budgeting for health care. They're gambling with their health, most people win but some people lose and they lose hard. They're hindsight isn't that they teach people that they should get health care and prioritize that in their budget. Rather they talk about socializing the costs because their irresponsibility somehow a burden to every other responsible person in society.
I’ve posted elsewhere in the thread if you want more details (just look for the fucking long comments) but bottom line: money über alles is not the way to run a health service, IMHO.
To anchor the ACA discussion, a calculator is showing someone making $26K at McDonald's would be paying $23 a month in premiums after subsidies (about 1% of their household income). They'll have copays, sure, but there is an OOP max; and while $23 a month isn't nothing at that income level, it's an important part of the budget IMO.
Secondly though; in Europe you don't have the potential to make a dumb choice because like it or not, you're getting decent healthcare.
Are all these anecdotes just people that had no coverage at all?
The cost thing has just always been the part of online discourse that sticks out to me, because it’s clear under current laws that it shouldn’t be the financial apocalypse people paint it as, unless they have 0 insurance.
When my wife walked into ER, she was just a little worried about a heavy period. Turns out it was a “time of life thing, stuff go crazy” but they also noticed her Sodium was low when they drew blood and admitted her.
ER being what it is, beds are at a premium, and they want to “turn beds” if they can, just like a restaurant wants to turn tables. They’re both run as a business. They tried to speed up my wife’s care and gave her too much Sodium too quickly (actually about 2x the rate recommended). She went into a coma.
They tried a bunch of things to bring her back. I’ll always remember the doctor saying “I don’t think she’ll die” is an almost bored, disinterested tone as she lay there. She wasn’t responding so they moved her to share a room where a woman was undergoing assisted suicide while they waited for her to revive. ER beds are at a premium, remember. They’re can charge a lot for those, so she was taking up valuable space.
She did eventually surface, but it’s not like the movies. You don’t just “wake up” and everything starts to get better. Things were so bad your brain shut down, that has consequences. She is awake, but she is not the same person, she’s terrified of, well, everything. There were months of neuropathic pain all over her body. Pain that wouldn’t go away with either OTC painkillers or anything else they tried, all the way up to opioids. Have you ever heard someone lose their voice from screaming so much ? She was still screaming in agony, but she wasn’t making a sound.
She has been in and out of mental health asylums over the last two years while we struggled to try and fix things. It hasn’t worked. I’ve had to give up my job to care for her, a job I loved, working at Apple these last 20 years. We leave the country, permanently, on 4th July, because we can’t live in San Jose without an income, we don’t have anyone else to help, and I can retire in the UK with my family around to help out on the days we need it. I’ve only really been waiting until the kid finished the year at school.
Doctors everywhere make mistakes. Not everywhere has a money/profit motive to drive treatment though, that’s pretty much only in the USA. I had excellent health insurance which covered our family but that makes no difference when the hospital just see you as a figure on a balance sheet.
Granny Weatherwax (created by a Brit, of course) had the right of it. The root of all evil is treating people as things. People as things, that’s it. In our experience, the US “healthcare” system does not treat people as humans, they’re just figures on a balance sheet.
It’s too late for it to get much better for my wife, and hell, the stress and pressure of the last 2 years has taken its toll on me too, apparently prolonged stress and the body’s reaction to it can provoke type-1 LADA diabetes, so now I’m fucked too. Not as badly as my wife, with a pump connected to me, I can live an almost normal life, but still.
The benefit of the UK’s system is that it’s based on patient care, not a balance sheet. Like I said, I’ve had long experience of both, and this idea that you “wait months” is not how it really works in the UK, in fact we have waited longer to see specialists in the USA (again, with gold-plated insurance) than I’ve ever waited in the UK. It doesn’t matter how much money you have (presumably bar Musk-like money) if the expert you need isn’t available…
The UK will prioritise people in need (my mother has recovered from two different cancers with very timely treatment, my uncle was in open-heart surgery the next day after his yearly physical,…) but will “slot you in” if there’s no medical emergency. It’s not perfect, and it’s now recovering from a decade or so of underfunding as the Tories tried to sell it off bit by bit, but I do not believe my wife would have experienced the same treatment as she did in the US - there just isn’t the same approach to medicine.
My advice: never go to O’Connor hospital in San Jose. They might just fuck up your life completely, so they can make more money.
I baffled that you think a society is better off leaving it up to individual choice whether to have any healthcare at all. That’s actually one of the main reasons why healthcare is so expensive and out of reach for many people in the US: leaving healthcare decisions to individuals leads to fragmented risk pools, higher administrative costs, and generally worse outcomes.
Is having to pay a few thousand for emergency care considered low in the US?
All you said is true. However, people are also competing with each other on lifestyle. It makes it mandatory to meet a certain level of financial performance if you want, for example, interesting friends or a girlfriend, let alone the same house as everyone, and kids. People who are a bit lower on the social scale then must part with the social insurance to increase their immediate lifestyle. Whereas when health insurance is mandatory for everyone, you won’t be competing with people who financially offer more during dates (except drug dealers and tax evaders; in Europe, professions which deal with cash like manual workers, have a much better lifestyle than engineers compared to their income).
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