If anyone is interested in an anecdote from a US American mid level dev living in Germany:
I get 30 paid vacation days, 10 ish public holidays and my employer has to pay up to 6 weeks of sick leave a year (after that the public health insurance pays).
I make around 75k€ with a 38 hour work week and my take home is roughly 3600€ net. My living expenses are less than 1k (mid sized city, no car, split rent, no kids) so I am able to invest 2-2.5x my living expenses every a month.
Most likely the average dev in the US with your level of skill still makes 2-4x more than you without 2-4x the expenses.
Germany may be good to live and get by but not great to actually grow, financially. The whole system is still designed so that you depend on your 800€ gov check in your senior years.
Unless your parents already built some wealth it is barely possible to do so in your own lifetime in Germany.
According to levels.fyi (if we assume its unbiased) a median dev income is around $82k in Germany vs $168k in the United States. Let's assume the mean is near that as I can't find any stats on median CoL. Also Let's compare two MCOL(?) hip cities: Portland OR and Leipzig.
$82k is $4.1k take home (with healthcare) as a single in Germany.
$168k is $8.8k take home as a single in Portland.
Let's say monthly expenses are $1.5k as a single in Leipzig. According to numbeo I would need $2.5k for the same standard in Portland.
So in Portland I can save $6.3k or 2.5x my expenses and in Leipzig I can save $2.6k or 1.6x my expenses.
Healthcare is included in the net pay for Leipzig, but not Portland. Employer 401k contributions and other benefits are also not considered.
Other things to consider are safety, unemployment, workers rights, tenant rights, quality of healthcare, cost of elderly care, government retirement plans, PTO, sick leave, maternity and paternity leave, cost of childcare, etc.
Invest that on the side and you'll have built a fortune within a decade and a half, while your German friend has nothing significant in savings and is still living hand to mouth.
And we haven't even mentioned the differences in career steepness: After a few years it's not 80k vs 160k anymore, but more like 90-100k vs 200k+.
Also if you compare the best places in each country than you are looking at something like 100k vs 300-400k.
Again, I have been trying really hard to see if all the benefits you mention really offset this monetary discrepancy, but it's just too huge.
Yep that's definitely true. Just comes down to what's important to you. You can fall hard and fast in the states but that's a lot less likely to happen in Germany.
The 4k extra take home is more significant if you move to a LCOL place once you have acquired your fortune, not if you stay in the States. I would argue things like FIRE or Lean-FIRE are only slightly easier to achieve in the US than in Germany because of the comparably HCOL.
I don't know enough about US health insurance to make a good comparison. In Germamy co-pays for doctor visits arent a thing and co-pays for meds are capped at 5-10 EUR.
Also if I go to the hospital and get a surgery or something I don't have a deductible or percentage I have to pay out of pocket.
My understanding of US insurance is that these are almost always a reality plus potentially a monthly premium.
Basically, good health plans like the ones you would get in a tech job will have either no or very low monthly premiums ($0-$50/month), and pretty low deductibles ($1k) and out-of-pocket maximums ($2k-$2.5k), meaning no matter what happens, you'll never pay more than $2.5k for your healthcare in a given year.
There are a few inaccuracies in your analysis. You're applying the levels.fyi median for Germany, which will skew heavily towards jobs in Berlin and Munich, towards Leipzig, a city in East Germany with way less high paying jobs. While levels.fyi doesn't provide a median for Leipzig, only 2 out of 25 entries there are (slightly) above $82k, so I greatly doubt that $82k is a reasonable number for an average engineer in Leipzig.
If we compare the median numbers for Portland and Munich, cities that actually have enough entries to have percentiles on levels.fyi, then the median compensations are $164k vs. $84k. That's $8.7k vs. $4.2k take home. Looking at Numbeo, the equivalent of $2.5k in Portland would be $2.1k in Munich, so that's $6.2k savings in Portland vs. $2.1k in Munich.
To me, that seems pretty significant.
There are two other aspects that can widen the gap. First, at the higher percentiles, the compensation in the US grows much higher than in Germany. Second, US engineers have the option of getting a significant increase in compensation by moving to the Bay Area, Seattle, or NYC, whereas in the EU you can't really go much higher than in Munich.
With the same calculation, it'd be $9.2k monthly savings in San Francisco vs. 2.1k savings in Munich.
I forgot about Switzerland. Arguably it's not EU, but it's still a place that EU citizens can easily go to.
Given that both Portland and Munich have 1000+ entries on levels.fyi and the given numbers are the calculated median, I'd say it's a fair assumption that getting the median comp in both locales would be equally hard.
Consecutive sick days. If you got in the icu because of corona for 5 weeks and the month after that because you got into a car crash for 4 weeks the employer has to pay for all the 9 weeks.
Not as bad as Berlin, Munich or Hamburg. I split around 1k€ (warm) for a newly remodeled/renovated 60m2 apartment in a very hip area close to the city center.
