zlacker

>>whoish+(OP)
I live in EU, earn approx €52,000 as a senior software engineer (whatever that might mean) and live a happy live with a house, mortgage, wife, children, ... Don't consider myself rich, but doing good. Should I change jobs?!

$168,000 - $350,000 for a Software Engineer seems outrageous. What am I missing?

>>repels+wm1
Living in the U.S. will get you a higher salary, not that small of taxes, but then extremely high cost of living. Homes are used by investors as assets to be traded and not lived in by people and we in the U.S. pay privatized costs for literally everything.

However, those salaries are indeed extremely high. I am surprised given Figma was purchased by Adobe.

>>bmitc+Pn1
That’s a misrepresentation and basically using the Bay Area as a reference point. I’m in Chicago. Starting sw engineer salaries is probably around $90k-$100k. The housing nightmare exists but not as bad - depends on your school district. A good 3000 sq ft house in a suburb palatine/Arlington heights or Buffalo grove is around the $600k-$800k mark. You could obviously go smaller for a lower price.

>>orochi+3z1
Misrepresentation, how exactly?

Also, I'm not using the Bay Area as a reference point and have never even been there.

>>bmitc+X42
So there is privatized cost for universities. That's actually a major chunk of privatized cost a family with kids will bear. In Illinois, U of I has a total cost of $40k/year (may vary by major) for undergraduate education.

The rest of it varies. Health care costs are mostly high deductible plans but a lot of companies proactively add money to your plan to soften that. In general, for a family you're looking at around $7k out of pocket per year. As long as all is good its fine. When there is the unfortunate situation of family members needing medical care you are saddled with the worry of maintaining your job. This is the spot that sucks the most in my opinion.

K-12 schools are government funded but you pay property taxes. Here again, depending on where you live you can get excellent schools or not so great ones. But I think that's the situation in most places.

The Bay Area maximizes these problems because cost of living is so high there. My point on the misrepresentation was that a lot of places in the US do not have Bay Area cost of living, especially with the real estate. So you can actually have a pretty good quality of life.