I have had a federal security clearance since I was a teenager and most of that time it’s been a top secret clearance. Yet, I never worked as a government contractor until my current employment. Huge mistake.
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.
How do you solve the catch-22 of security clearance? It seems that a lot of jobs require it but not so many people want to pay for me to get it. Is it possible to get clearance by myself on the side (assume I'm willing to deal with the fees and paperwork)?
No. You must have a sponsor that pays for the clearance. The government officially claims that a secret clearance costs around $3000 and a top secret costs around $15000. That does not include the actual investigation of sending people into the field to perform interviews. The actual costs can be well into 6 figures. You don't want to pay for that.
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.
I've worked for major US companies in the Bay Area/NYC and German companies here in Europe so I feel like I can weigh in here.
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...
I've never worked in Germany, but I worked for the U.S. branch of a German multinational company, reported to a German manager and visited Germany a couple of times.
Living in Germany felt like it wasn't for me. There is very little diversity in ethnic foods (doner kebaps and Italian was about as ethnic as it got, outside of a sprinkling of Chinese restaurants), and everything felt really old (in a conservative way -- not in an artistic way like in Paris). Foodies would struggle with Germany (great breads, sausages, pork, and beer but nothing else stands out).
German management was also not for me -- it felt really old-fashioned compared to American management, and it was hard to do anything new -- there were a lot of gatekeepers where it was their way or the highway. Ideas would get discussed and blocked at every turn, and there were lots of rigid egos.
The U-Bahn/S-Bahn/ICE train systems there were good (undoubtedly, better than anything in America), but compared to Asia or other parts of Europe, they felt a bit old and not really that punctual. The whole place just lacked dynamism.
It's ironic because I've admired Germany all my life. This is, after all, the land of Gauss, Bach, Goethe, Beethoven, etc. It's the land of great physicists and chemists.
Yet there is a sense that what was once great about Germany (all the great thinkers, high tech, etc.) is not really at the forefront anymore. Instead, I saw a nation resting on its laurels, and accepting too much bureaucracy in many aspects of life.
If I was into doing lifestyle optimization, I feel I'll find a decent, if unexciting, life in Germany where my basic needs are taken care of.
But I feel if you really want to work on something new and exciting, that's not the place to be. (I was in Munich where the money is but people are conservative when it comes to new things. I heard Berlin is much more innovative but generally have no money to scale).
I run a website about migrating to Germany. I have to teol people that they should take sick days when they're sick, and that they should not even look at their emails when they're on vacation. It's not just laws, but a culture that backs them up.
A favourite fact of mine is that if you're sick when on vacation, you get your vacation days back.
I mean there are still toxic companies in Germany as well. There are people who are too scared to take their sick days.
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.
Culture. You probably don't have to take PTO for sick days, you probably get a lot of vacation days and won't get pressure not to take them, you probably won't get called past 5 o'clock or on weekends, etc.
I'm not disputing the title per se as I have not worked for EU companies. Having said that, news articles of this sort usually interview a few people and then has the journalist draw a conclusion by way of storytelling.
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 points are generally applicable to any decent employer in the EU and most non-EU European countries, white collar work in particular. This is the norm not because companies are so much nicer. Most of this is codified in law. Some countries have better conditions than others. Minimum vacation period, paid overtime, the healthcare system, the public pension system, job security (protections from dismissal), employee representatives or union, etc. Your mileage may vary if you work remotely.
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.
I couldn't my finger on this myself, but you nailed my feelings well.
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.
I had this same situation but if you are located in the US they will lay you off accordingly to US laws, which means it can happen anytime, but they will be nicer about it and maybe pay you a month to do nothing, on top of severance pay. The vacation time was high though.
I have worked for a european tech giant for over six years now. And when talking to my US friends, this is the biggest difference I have seen.
> 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.
This difference is probably also why my brother who moved to US, and Now back to Europe (with his American wife) struggle with European colleagues.
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.
Leaving at 5pm seems entirely reasonable to a non workaholic. When is a reasonable time that you think people should leave to prove their worth I wonder. At some point it’s a performative race to the bottom. And yes I know the game industry loves to abuse peoples passion by demanding crunch and burning out young engineers for crap pay.
When will Americans realize that the EU is not a monolithic bloc? She worked for an Austrian company and benefited from Austrian laws and work culture.
The EU is not a monolithic bloc, we have vast differences in overall culture, language, politics and more. Economy as well of course. To me, used to the northern parts, a place like Italy certainly feels foreign because so much is different. But employment laws are not as different as that.
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 would challenge you to find a country in the EU that has worse worker protections than the US, whether through statute or culture (for example norms about unionization).
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).
The working culture and laws between Bulgaria and Denmark are drastically different. It is absurd to talk about Denmark as if it were universal EU law. What you are experiencing is particular to Denmark. It is Danish law and work culture you are benefitting from.
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.
50% of the time? Maybe misunderstood, this was about resignation/notice period. You have to be employed 3-6 months to get employment protection. Paid off time is around 25-30 days everywhere.
It's not monolithic, but with freedom of movement inside its bound, it creates enough competition it's structurally harder to have any single country with really bad labor laws.
Sure there are cultural differences between countries, but everything she said applies to all EU companies as far as my experience goes. Work life balance, work not being identity, holidays, etc. it's all applicable to every country in the EU I've worked in regardless of the local culture.
When you find out, don't forget to factor in everything else she gets.
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!
Michigan's average salary is a it below Austria's average salary. Not having American costs covered (healthcare etc) may change the salary impact a little.
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.
Wait till someone gets a serious disease (as it happens in many families) and lose their home, car, and their shirt because US healthcare is ....(crickets).
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.
I'm not saying that all US companies offer decent healthcare options, but that's often because employees don't value that as a negotiation point. I did, and my son was in a horrible car crash and died after many days in ICU and many surgeries. My out of pocket cost was a few thousand to hit the max. Because I cared about healthcare coverage instead of a slightly higher salary.
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.
This is not the case for me and mine. We had the best insurance money could buy, and a hospital still decided to prioritise money over patient need, which put my wife into a coma and ruined her (and my, for that matter) life.
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.
So doesn't that then leave Medicare/Medicaid/ACA Exchange plans with their significant subsidies?
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.
The "One Big Beautiful Bill" (OBBB) is changing some of that. It will be $23 a month after their application of the tax credits is approved.
Currently you get the credits immediately and if it turns out they are too high or too low that is taken care of next year when you do your taxes.
With the change in the OBBB you will have to pay the full amount while the application for tax credits is being verified.
Also currently if you are happy with your current plan you don't have to do anything to reenroll for the next year. The marketplace can automatically enroll you in the same plan next year (or an equivalent one if your insurance company has changed their offerings). The marketplace can automatically get your tax information and handle getting you set up for the tax credits for the next year.
The OBBB is changing that so that every year you have to reapply for the tax credit, and so potentially each year you might have to pay the full amount while that is being verified.
The net result of the OBBB will be about 1/3 of the people currently on ACA not being able to remain on it [1].
Yes, this is very true. I do think part of the problem is people aren't taught about this and adding it in to their budget. It's not nothing, but even for low wage earners it's the cost of a few energy drinks or maybe forgoing the newest iPhone/Samsung.
1. The US health insurance market is not a free marketplace. It's almost as far away from a free marketplace as you can get. It's socialized medicine, just done in smaller, shittier fiefdoms.
2. I've never in my life seen anyone successfully negotiate health insurance with their employer. You get a pamphlet with your pre-determined shitty options and you have to pick one.
That's something I've never understood around so many of these discussions, particularly post-ACA. I get there are some gaps around the out of pocket maximum, but if you have healthcare, even a serious medical event shouldn't be ruinous.
Are all these anecdotes just people that had no coverage at all?
1. Bad plans have really, really high deductibles and high OOP max. If you're looking at 9K OOP max then you can absolutely be financially ruined. I mean, for many people that's more than their car.
2. Out of network charges and ridiculous billing. You can get denied, you can be given the run-around, and you WILL pay more than whatever your OOP max is. Your hospital visit will result in you getting bills 3 months later. Things will conveniently slip through the cracks.
3. Not everything is covered, for example, long-term care. If you're old and sick and need to be in a nursing home, you're 100% fucked. You need medicaid for that. Not medicare, that doesn't cover it, you need medicaid. So you need to basically forfeit all your money you've ever made. Or, pay 10k a month, which is functionally equivalent for almost everyone.
(EU person) From my reading, the cost is just the start. Others are: insurance companies rejecting claims for stupid reasons; providers overdoing treatments to maximize their bills; the stress involved navigating all this hostile system etc.
I don’t disagree that secondary issues don’t exist, but I also don’t think they’re unique to the American system. I’d think that there’s stress inherent to Canada or Britain’s system, with months-long waits, for instance.
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 would say it's more of a value choice. I value freedom to make choices and make my own risk vs reward decisions. I want to be in a society where others are encouraged to think critically about their choices (yes I know it largely doesn't happen). Others like to just be taken care of, without having to consider different choices. So any view of "better" will be subjective.
When it comes to risk-reward decisions, I think humans are pretty bad at this. Individual circumstances often influence decisions more than statistical reasoning. The chance that a human will need the expertise of a health professional at some point in their life is close to 100%, but it’s impossible to predict when and in what capacity.
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.
Yes. Costs can vary dramatically based on what we're calling emergency care, however. Some people go to an emergency room for flu-like symptoms, others are brought in with major trauma from a car crash. Understandably those can result in very different bills and very different care-for-$ perceptions.
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).
I have had a federal security clearance since I was a teenager and most of that time it’s been a top secret clearance. Yet, I never worked as a government contractor until my current employment. Huge mistake.
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.
How do you solve the catch-22 of security clearance? It seems that a lot of jobs require it but not so many people want to pay for me to get it. Is it possible to get clearance by myself on the side (assume I'm willing to deal with the fees and paperwork)?
No. You must have a sponsor that pays for the clearance. The government officially claims that a secret clearance costs around $3000 and a top secret costs around $15000. That does not include the actual investigation of sending people into the field to perform interviews. The actual costs can be well into 6 figures. You don't want to pay for that.
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.
I've worked for major US companies in the Bay Area/NYC and German companies here in Europe so I feel like I can weigh in here.
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...
I've never worked in Germany, but I worked for the U.S. branch of a German multinational company, reported to a German manager and visited Germany a couple of times.
Living in Germany felt like it wasn't for me. There is very little diversity in ethnic foods (doner kebaps and Italian was about as ethnic as it got, outside of a sprinkling of Chinese restaurants), and everything felt really old (in a conservative way -- not in an artistic way like in Paris). Foodies would struggle with Germany (great breads, sausages, pork, and beer but nothing else stands out).
German management was also not for me -- it felt really old-fashioned compared to American management, and it was hard to do anything new -- there were a lot of gatekeepers where it was their way or the highway. Ideas would get discussed and blocked at every turn, and there were lots of rigid egos.
The U-Bahn/S-Bahn/ICE train systems there were good (undoubtedly, better than anything in America), but compared to Asia or other parts of Europe, they felt a bit old and not really that punctual. The whole place just lacked dynamism.
It's ironic because I've admired Germany all my life. This is, after all, the land of Gauss, Bach, Goethe, Beethoven, etc. It's the land of great physicists and chemists.
Yet there is a sense that what was once great about Germany (all the great thinkers, high tech, etc.) is not really at the forefront anymore. Instead, I saw a nation resting on its laurels, and accepting too much bureaucracy in many aspects of life.
If I was into doing lifestyle optimization, I feel I'll find a decent, if unexciting, life in Germany where my basic needs are taken care of.
But I feel if you really want to work on something new and exciting, that's not the place to be. (I was in Munich where the money is but people are conservative when it comes to new things. I heard Berlin is much more innovative but generally have no money to scale).
I run a website about migrating to Germany. I have to teol people that they should take sick days when they're sick, and that they should not even look at their emails when they're on vacation. It's not just laws, but a culture that backs them up.
A favourite fact of mine is that if you're sick when on vacation, you get your vacation days back.
My favorite is the right to go to part time work after 6 months. People don't realize the 4 day work week already exists in Germany if you want it.
Sure, though the 4 day week is really taking the same amount of pay as you would for 5 days, so it's not the same.
Sure but it’s not something you could ever expect to do in the US.
I mean there are still toxic companies in Germany as well. There are people who are too scared to take their sick days.
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.
> I'd never willfully move back to the US
Do you think there's benefit to working for an EU company from the US?
Culture. You probably don't have to take PTO for sick days, you probably get a lot of vacation days and won't get pressure not to take them, you probably won't get called past 5 o'clock or on weekends, etc.
Any advice for an American in BigTech looking to move to Europe? I've been applying for EU jobs for awhile but that seems like a lottery
I'm not disputing the title per se as I have not worked for EU companies. Having said that, news articles of this sort usually interview a few people and then has the journalist draw a conclusion by way of storytelling.
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 points are generally applicable to any decent employer in the EU and most non-EU European countries, white collar work in particular. This is the norm not because companies are so much nicer. Most of this is codified in law. Some countries have better conditions than others. Minimum vacation period, paid overtime, the healthcare system, the public pension system, job security (protections from dismissal), employee representatives or union, etc. Your mileage may vary if you work remotely.
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.
[dead]
I couldn't my finger on this myself, but you nailed my feelings well.
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.
That’s because it is an advertisement.
I love it when HR commenters discover PR.
The question then is why there's an advertorial on the front page? :)
HN is an advertising/marketing campaign run for a VC firm. You should assume nearly everything here is an ad of some kind in disguise.
I had this same situation but if you are located in the US they will lay you off accordingly to US laws, which means it can happen anytime, but they will be nicer about it and maybe pay you a month to do nothing, on top of severance pay. The vacation time was high though.
I worked in Glu Mobile when EA took them over.
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.
https://archive.ph/tiaLg
I have worked for a european tech giant for over six years now. And when talking to my US friends, this is the biggest difference I have seen.
> 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.
This difference is probably also why my brother who moved to US, and Now back to Europe (with his American wife) struggle with European colleagues.
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
Leaving at 5pm seems entirely reasonable to a non workaholic. When is a reasonable time that you think people should leave to prove their worth I wonder. At some point it’s a performative race to the bottom. And yes I know the game industry loves to abuse peoples passion by demanding crunch and burning out young engineers for crap pay.
When will Americans realize that the EU is not a monolithic bloc? She worked for an Austrian company and benefited from Austrian laws and work culture.
The EU is not a monolithic bloc, we have vast differences in overall culture, language, politics and more. Economy as well of course. To me, used to the northern parts, a place like Italy certainly feels foreign because so much is different. But employment laws are not as different as that.
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 would challenge you to find a country in the EU that has worse worker protections than the US, whether through statute or culture (for example norms about unionization).
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).
The working culture and laws between Bulgaria and Denmark are drastically different. It is absurd to talk about Denmark as if it were universal EU law. What you are experiencing is particular to Denmark. It is Danish law and work culture you are benefitting from.
EU laws are mostly scynchronized. Bulgaria has 1 month guaranteed minimum, IT companies typically give 3 as well.
The article is specifically not about IT jobs.
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.
> seems totally unbelievable.
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.
Do you have a shred of evidence? How does a company function with managers only there 50% if the time.
50% of the time? Maybe misunderstood, this was about resignation/notice period. You have to be employed 3-6 months to get employment protection. Paid off time is around 25-30 days everywhere.
It's not monolithic, but with freedom of movement inside its bound, it creates enough competition it's structurally harder to have any single country with really bad labor laws.
Sure there are cultural differences between countries, but everything she said applies to all EU companies as far as my experience goes. Work life balance, work not being identity, holidays, etc. it's all applicable to every country in the EU I've worked in regardless of the local culture.
When will Europeans realize that the USA is not a monolithic bloc?
wonder what the pay difference is
When you find out, don't forget to factor in everything else she gets.
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!
She works in people ops, where I’d expect the US pay premium to be low or non-existent, at least as compared to tech.
The whole point is that this doesn't matter, it's a much less important factor than US employees would assume.
Michigan's average salary is a it below Austria's average salary. Not having American costs covered (healthcare etc) may change the salary impact a little.
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.
Wait till someone gets a serious disease (as it happens in many families) and lose their home, car, and their shirt because US healthcare is ....(crickets).
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..
I'm not saying that all US companies offer decent healthcare options, but that's often because employees don't value that as a negotiation point. I did, and my son was in a horrible car crash and died after many days in ICU and many surgeries. My out of pocket cost was a few thousand to hit the max. Because I cared about healthcare coverage instead of a slightly higher salary.
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.
This is not the case for me and mine. We had the best insurance money could buy, and a hospital still decided to prioritise money over patient need, which put my wife into a coma and ruined her (and my, for that matter) life.
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.
This is a pretty privileged take. There are a lot of people who are never going to find a job with an expensive employer provided health plan.
So doesn't that then leave Medicare/Medicaid/ACA Exchange plans with their significant subsidies?
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.
The "One Big Beautiful Bill" (OBBB) is changing some of that. It will be $23 a month after their application of the tax credits is approved.
Currently you get the credits immediately and if it turns out they are too high or too low that is taken care of next year when you do your taxes.
With the change in the OBBB you will have to pay the full amount while the application for tax credits is being verified.
Also currently if you are happy with your current plan you don't have to do anything to reenroll for the next year. The marketplace can automatically enroll you in the same plan next year (or an equivalent one if your insurance company has changed their offerings). The marketplace can automatically get your tax information and handle getting you set up for the tax credits for the next year.
The OBBB is changing that so that every year you have to reapply for the tax credit, and so potentially each year you might have to pay the full amount while that is being verified.
The net result of the OBBB will be about 1/3 of the people currently on ACA not being able to remain on it [1].
[1] https://www.aha.org/fact-sheets/2025-06-05-fact-sheet-one-bi...
Yes, this is very true. I do think part of the problem is people aren't taught about this and adding it in to their budget. It's not nothing, but even for low wage earners it's the cost of a few energy drinks or maybe forgoing the newest iPhone/Samsung.
1. The US health insurance market is not a free marketplace. It's almost as far away from a free marketplace as you can get. It's socialized medicine, just done in smaller, shittier fiefdoms.
2. I've never in my life seen anyone successfully negotiate health insurance with their employer. You get a pamphlet with your pre-determined shitty options and you have to pick one.
First of all; fuck I'm so sorry :(
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.
That's something I've never understood around so many of these discussions, particularly post-ACA. I get there are some gaps around the out of pocket maximum, but if you have healthcare, even a serious medical event shouldn't be ruinous.
Are all these anecdotes just people that had no coverage at all?
Well, there's a lot going on here:
1. Bad plans have really, really high deductibles and high OOP max. If you're looking at 9K OOP max then you can absolutely be financially ruined. I mean, for many people that's more than their car.
2. Out of network charges and ridiculous billing. You can get denied, you can be given the run-around, and you WILL pay more than whatever your OOP max is. Your hospital visit will result in you getting bills 3 months later. Things will conveniently slip through the cracks.
3. Not everything is covered, for example, long-term care. If you're old and sick and need to be in a nursing home, you're 100% fucked. You need medicaid for that. Not medicare, that doesn't cover it, you need medicaid. So you need to basically forfeit all your money you've ever made. Or, pay 10k a month, which is functionally equivalent for almost everyone.
(EU person) From my reading, the cost is just the start. Others are: insurance companies rejecting claims for stupid reasons; providers overdoing treatments to maximize their bills; the stress involved navigating all this hostile system etc.
I don’t disagree that secondary issues don’t exist, but I also don’t think they’re unique to the American system. I’d think that there’s stress inherent to Canada or Britain’s system, with months-long waits, for instance.
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.
Here’s something that’s different.
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.
So in general you would argue the US system is better?
I would say it's more of a value choice. I value freedom to make choices and make my own risk vs reward decisions. I want to be in a society where others are encouraged to think critically about their choices (yes I know it largely doesn't happen). Others like to just be taken care of, without having to consider different choices. So any view of "better" will be subjective.
When it comes to risk-reward decisions, I think humans are pretty bad at this. Individual circumstances often influence decisions more than statistical reasoning. The chance that a human will need the expertise of a health professional at some point in their life is close to 100%, but it’s impossible to predict when and in what capacity.
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.
> My out of pocket cost was a few thousand to hit the max. Because I cared about healthcare coverage instead of a slightly higher salary.
Is having to pay a few thousand for emergency care considered low in the US?
Yes. Costs can vary dramatically based on what we're calling emergency care, however. Some people go to an emergency room for flu-like symptoms, others are brought in with major trauma from a car crash. Understandably those can result in very different bills and very different care-for-$ perceptions.
> because they prioritize short-term gains
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).
They're working remote from the US so not sure how your first point is relevant.
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