5 ms·

Compared to the US. Dan Abramov who works for Facebook and is one of the primary engineers of the hugely popular React framework makes less than one of my junio

Compared to the US. Dan Abramov who works for Facebook and is one of the primary engineers of the hugely popular React framework makes less than one of my junior engineers.

progbits 3y ago
And when he gets sick gets free healthcare while your junior will go bankrupt. Compensation isn't comparable without comparing external costs and benefits.
- dom96 3y ago
  And as a FB employee gets private healthcare as a perk and would also get it in the US. The US comp is much higher than the UK's even taking into account healthcare.
  - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    And what about long-term illness? If he fell ill for 1+ year, would his salary and healthcare be guaranteed or would he go bankrupt?
    - tchaffee 3y ago
      That's is indeed where the US system fails. Overall though I think the risk reward ratio favors the US for young healthy engineers. Save up enough to retire at 45 and then get yourself to a country with good nationalized healthcare.
    - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
      All US employers I've worked for included disability and long-term injury insurance as standard benefits, in addition to always offering the best-tier health-plans (from non-profit insurers too). Unemployment insurance is another (legally mandatory) benefit that outshines whatever I'd get in the UK because it isn't considered a public-benefit (i.e. it's not the state or Feds paying it ("welfare" as yanks call it), it's still a insurance pool model where the payouts are proportional to your salary and not some arbitrary income limit the DWP set for the year, nor is means-tested or requires me to use-up my savings first - so in WA ( https://esd.wa.gov/unemployment/calculate-your-benefit https://esd.wa.gov/unemployment/calculate-your-benefit ) I'd be getting about $4k/mo for 6 months, for comparison I quickly ran the numbers on benefits-calculator.turn2us.org.uk (there's no official UK calculator, wat) just now and got... £300/mo - and that's only after I exhaust all my savings first. (To be fair, I could just purchase private unemployment insurance in the UK too, except I'd be paying for it myself out-of-pocket (though it might be a tax-deductible expense?) whereas in WA employers are required to pay into it at no cost to the employee, IIRC).
      - tchaffee 3y ago
        > long-term injury insurance It eventually runs out. The US healthcare system can eventually bankrupt you no matter how careful you are, if your health problems are serious enough.
    - sgerenser 3y ago
      I don’t know about Facebook, but at other BigTechs we were offered very affordable short and long term disability plans. And if your income is low enough (e.g. laid off or fired), you qualify for ACA health plans with huge subsidies making it almost free.
      - tchaffee 3y ago
        > long term disability plans It eventually runs out. Medical bankruptcy is pretty widespread in the US.
    - jkaplowitz 3y ago
      Facebook very probably has a group long-term disability insurance policy which adequately its employees in that case. Google did when I worked there many years ago. Some supports might also come from Social Security Disability Insurance, Medicare, and loans or withdrawals from retirement accounts that are far better funded at Facebook US than at Facebook UK.
      - tchaffee 3y ago
        > long-term disability insurance policy It eventually runs out. Medical bankruptcy is pretty widespread in the US.
        jkaplowitz 3y ago
        It eventually runs out, yes, but the good long-term disability policies last until retirement age, when social security retirement benefits kick in. You may be confusing it with a short-term disability policy, which is more common, or with mediocre long-term policies. Medical bankruptcy is indeed pretty widespread in the US, but not among people with Facebook or Google benefits, not even those with career-ending disabilities. You’re underestimating the inequality of benefits within the US. Not a permanent work stoppage example, but here is one relevant anecdote: I have personal knowledge of someone who got severely crippled by a freak accident that would have made most Americans go bankrupt and never be able to work again, including a need for repeated brain surgery. His FAANG employer benefits paid for what he needed, and although he was permanently wheelchair bound, he was eventually even able to return to work part-time (of course not initially) because of how good their benefits are.
        tchaffee 3y ago
        > Medical bankruptcy is indeed pretty widespread in the US, but not among people with Facebook or Google benefits. That's interesting. What's your data source showing this outcome?
        jkaplowitz 3y ago
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    But once he/she has a family (or just a pregnant partner) he/she is really handcuffed to the job by that perk, no? The risk of losing that cover makes it very difficult to make sensible life choices.
    - tchaffee 3y ago
      Is your claim that a Facebook engineer would have trouble finding a different job with high compensation and great healthcare? That's a bold and hard to believe claim.
      - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
        This comes across as quite rude, TBH. But answering you on the merits: it’s entirely possible, yes. For example, what if sensible life choices include moving out of state to a place where there is less tech industry? Just changing jobs can interrupt healthcare and cause costs. And the process of switching providers is, in the experience of a friend with a family with complex healthcare needs, sometimes so kafkaesque it might not be worth the risk. What if sensible life choices involve blowing the whistle or just being critical of the industry? Can you risk it? What if sensible life choices mean wanting to substitute time so your partner can go back to work? Does their plan match yours for the benefits you’ve both come to rely on? It’s not unusual at all for people in all sorts of situations and on all sorts of incomes to effectively end up tied to a job by the security of specific features of a workplace health plan. Use your imagination before you just jump in and belittle an argument. I do wonder if people in the particular FAANG bubbles are just too young and healthy to understand that healthcare plans aren’t just a tradeable, interchangeable perk: once you are really deeply using them, they can get a lot less interchangeable.
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        I have been buying health insurance that uses Blue Cross Blue Shield’s network in the US, and in 4 different states with 4 different health insurance companies on east and west coast it did not seem to make any difference. I have bought them on healthcare.gov, and I have received them from employer, and it all seems to be interchangeable from my experience over the last 10+ years.
- tchaffee 3y ago
  I agree you need to consider total compensation. It's still not even close though. The company pays half the cost of excellent healthcare and the remaining payment is very affordable. Maybe in the case of a very serious long term illness you might go bankrupt, in which case the NHS these days is also not as much of a guarantee as it used to be. The risk to reward ratio is acceptable. Most healthy young people with talent are far better off working in the US and saving enough to retire at 45 years old. I say this as someone who would like it to not be true having loved living and working in the EU and UK for many years. But the numbers do not add up. It's especially sad because it results in brain drain. The saddest part of it is that there is no reason Facebook can't afford to pay the Dan Abramovs of the world the compensation they would get in the US. I'd like to better understand why the gap is so big.
- boeingUH60 3y ago
  What a silly, coping lie. A Facebook engineer in the US gets good private healthcare insurance.
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    Hot-take: It's an emotional defence mechanism: on-the-whole the UK and US are far too similar and integrated that it's natural for middle-class Brits to larely consider themselves peers, and not near-peers, of their US counterparts - so when you have that view of yourself and your place in the world but then look at the stark the income disparity, you're going to comfort yourself with all of the bad things about the US (and the US' bad things are legion) - and invoking the egalitarian NHS happens because the UK gets its impression of the US healthcare "system" (industry?) from things like Michael Moore's Sicko or Times columnists reporting on all the messed-up healthcare injustices that happen in the US - but there is a very real ignorance of what healthcare is like in the US when the system does actually work well for you. And if it isn't NHS vs. "doesn't &everyone* get medical-bankruptcy?" then it'll be about guns, or the death penalty, or overt racism in the south, or corporate america's excesses, or US foreign-policy, and so on. Because those are the things that Channel 4 will report on - but you won't see or read stories that upset anyone's feelings on their place in the world: and it works on everyone: I've already mentioned Guardian-reading types, but also and especially the Brexit-types: who still desperately want to believe the British empire could be brought-back because the Daily Express told them so.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  As much as I like the NHS, it’s pretty shit compared to the healthcare a Facebook employee would get in the US. Wait weeks to see a GP, long waiting times to see a specialist or for treatment, rationing of access to technology like MRIs, and a risk of dying in a hospital car park or corridor, or being killed by an overworked A&E doctor. Don’t get me wrong, the NHS is great, I love that Boris Johnson got more or less the same care in St Thomas’ that a homeless person would have received (perhaps a bit better). But on an individual level, the FB engineer in US certainly has better care available to them than one in the UK.
  - tchaffee 3y ago
    The one case where your argument fails is very serious illnesses where you can't continue to work. In the US you will end up with worse care. And let's hope the NHS problems are temporary. When I worked in London and the US ten years ago, I always preferred the NHS because the waiting times were shorter and the quality of care was much higher. I used the NHS a few weeks ago. It wasn't horrible and I got good quality of care within a reasonable time. But it's nothing close to how good it used to be so for the serious part of my care I went to the far better hospital in Brazil covered by my employer provided insurance. I would guess the NHS will change. Voters are unhappy with the reckless defunding of what used to be a national pride. The US does provide better care right now if you are rich or privileged enough to have a job that is in demand. But a well funded NHS is a far better system if the political will to get back to that exists.
    - RhysU 3y ago
      > ...very serious illnesses where you can't continue to work. In the US, if possible, carry long term disability insurance to mitigate this risk.
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      > I would guess the NHS will change. Voters are unhappy with the reckless defunding of what used to be a national pride. I am not sure that is the case? The country seems to have a weird obsession with the NHS and seems to downplay/overlook its problems. Frankly even before its recent woes, I found it pretty shit compared to socialized healthcare in France. The current state of the NHS should prompt riots, yet everyone seems complacent in seeing their literal lifeline being destroyed by greedy, incompetent & senile oligarchs.
- m4jor 3y ago
  [flagged]
- commonlisp94 3y ago
  > he gets sick gets free healthcare Free at the cost of a significantly larger portion of his salary in tax for his entire life.
  - tchaffee 3y ago
    The tax differences aren't that big, and they come with other nationalized services in addition to healthcare. Per capita healthcare costs in countries with nationalized healthcare can be 50% less than in the US. So you're getting much better value for your money when you pay taxes for that healthcare. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/ https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
    - commonlisp94 3y ago
      Ok, but that's a completely different argument than it being free.
sentinalien 3y ago
They're fairly competitive compared to the rest of the world. He is also working for a US company who could pay him more if they really wanted to. US salaries are high because the US has a glut of engineering jobs and is also a difficult place to immigrate to (generally requires you to have family ties or a job offer which is not easy to obtain when you might not be granted a work visa and won't realistically be able to start for about 6 months). If the US ever adopted a more lax immigration system in line with the UK, Canada, the EU etc I would expect US engineering salaries to drop.
- kriro 3y ago
  In what world is the post-Brexit UK immigration system lax?
  - extraduder_ire 3y ago
    Compared to the US system of workers' visas, it's incredibly lax. Unless I'm misinformed. I haven't had to think about it much though, as I'm an Irish citizen and can come and go as I please.
- tchaffee 3y ago
  > They're fairly competitive compared to the rest of the world. That's accurate. But what surprises me is how much in demand software engineers are globally and how little they get paid in most countries. It doesn't make any sense to me that Dan Abramov could more than triple his salary at Facebook just by being employed by the US branch. The value he provides to the company would in no way change.

Compared to the US. Dan Abramov who works for Facebook and is one of the primary engineers of the hugely popular React framework makes less than one of my junior engineers.

progbits 3y ago

And when he gets sick gets free healthcare while your junior will go bankrupt. Compensation isn't comparable without comparing external costs and benefits.

dom96 3y ago
And as a FB employee gets private healthcare as a perk and would also get it in the US. The US comp is much higher than the UK's even taking into account healthcare.
- Tijdreiziger 3y ago
  And what about long-term illness? If he fell ill for 1+ year, would his salary and healthcare be guaranteed or would he go bankrupt?
  - tchaffee 3y ago
    That's is indeed where the US system fails. Overall though I think the risk reward ratio favors the US for young healthy engineers. Save up enough to retire at 45 and then get yourself to a country with good nationalized healthcare.
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    All US employers I've worked for included disability and long-term injury insurance as standard benefits, in addition to always offering the best-tier health-plans (from non-profit insurers too). Unemployment insurance is another (legally mandatory) benefit that outshines whatever I'd get in the UK because it isn't considered a public-benefit (i.e. it's not the state or Feds paying it ("welfare" as yanks call it), it's still a insurance pool model where the payouts are proportional to your salary and not some arbitrary income limit the DWP set for the year, nor is means-tested or requires me to use-up my savings first - so in WA ( https://esd.wa.gov/unemployment/calculate-your-benefit https://esd.wa.gov/unemployment/calculate-your-benefit ) I'd be getting about $4k/mo for 6 months, for comparison I quickly ran the numbers on benefits-calculator.turn2us.org.uk (there's no official UK calculator, wat) just now and got... £300/mo - and that's only after I exhaust all my savings first. (To be fair, I could just purchase private unemployment insurance in the UK too, except I'd be paying for it myself out-of-pocket (though it might be a tax-deductible expense?) whereas in WA employers are required to pay into it at no cost to the employee, IIRC).
    - tchaffee 3y ago
      > long-term injury insurance It eventually runs out. The US healthcare system can eventually bankrupt you no matter how careful you are, if your health problems are serious enough.
  - sgerenser 3y ago
    I don’t know about Facebook, but at other BigTechs we were offered very affordable short and long term disability plans. And if your income is low enough (e.g. laid off or fired), you qualify for ACA health plans with huge subsidies making it almost free.
    - tchaffee 3y ago
      > long term disability plans It eventually runs out. Medical bankruptcy is pretty widespread in the US.
  - jkaplowitz 3y ago
    Facebook very probably has a group long-term disability insurance policy which adequately its employees in that case. Google did when I worked there many years ago. Some supports might also come from Social Security Disability Insurance, Medicare, and loans or withdrawals from retirement accounts that are far better funded at Facebook US than at Facebook UK.
    - tchaffee 3y ago
      > long-term disability insurance policy It eventually runs out. Medical bankruptcy is pretty widespread in the US.
      - jkaplowitz 3y ago
        It eventually runs out, yes, but the good long-term disability policies last until retirement age, when social security retirement benefits kick in. You may be confusing it with a short-term disability policy, which is more common, or with mediocre long-term policies. Medical bankruptcy is indeed pretty widespread in the US, but not among people with Facebook or Google benefits, not even those with career-ending disabilities. You’re underestimating the inequality of benefits within the US. Not a permanent work stoppage example, but here is one relevant anecdote: I have personal knowledge of someone who got severely crippled by a freak accident that would have made most Americans go bankrupt and never be able to work again, including a need for repeated brain surgery. His FAANG employer benefits paid for what he needed, and although he was permanently wheelchair bound, he was eventually even able to return to work part-time (of course not initially) because of how good their benefits are.
        tchaffee 3y ago
        > Medical bankruptcy is indeed pretty widespread in the US, but not among people with Facebook or Google benefits. That's interesting. What's your data source showing this outcome?
        jkaplowitz 3y ago
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  But once he/she has a family (or just a pregnant partner) he/she is really handcuffed to the job by that perk, no? The risk of losing that cover makes it very difficult to make sensible life choices.
  - tchaffee 3y ago
    Is your claim that a Facebook engineer would have trouble finding a different job with high compensation and great healthcare? That's a bold and hard to believe claim.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      This comes across as quite rude, TBH. But answering you on the merits: it’s entirely possible, yes. For example, what if sensible life choices include moving out of state to a place where there is less tech industry? Just changing jobs can interrupt healthcare and cause costs. And the process of switching providers is, in the experience of a friend with a family with complex healthcare needs, sometimes so kafkaesque it might not be worth the risk. What if sensible life choices involve blowing the whistle or just being critical of the industry? Can you risk it? What if sensible life choices mean wanting to substitute time so your partner can go back to work? Does their plan match yours for the benefits you’ve both come to rely on? It’s not unusual at all for people in all sorts of situations and on all sorts of incomes to effectively end up tied to a job by the security of specific features of a workplace health plan. Use your imagination before you just jump in and belittle an argument. I do wonder if people in the particular FAANG bubbles are just too young and healthy to understand that healthcare plans aren’t just a tradeable, interchangeable perk: once you are really deeply using them, they can get a lot less interchangeable.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        I have been buying health insurance that uses Blue Cross Blue Shield’s network in the US, and in 4 different states with 4 different health insurance companies on east and west coast it did not seem to make any difference. I have bought them on healthcare.gov, and I have received them from employer, and it all seems to be interchangeable from my experience over the last 10+ years.
tchaffee 3y ago
I agree you need to consider total compensation. It's still not even close though. The company pays half the cost of excellent healthcare and the remaining payment is very affordable. Maybe in the case of a very serious long term illness you might go bankrupt, in which case the NHS these days is also not as much of a guarantee as it used to be. The risk to reward ratio is acceptable. Most healthy young people with talent are far better off working in the US and saving enough to retire at 45 years old. I say this as someone who would like it to not be true having loved living and working in the EU and UK for many years. But the numbers do not add up. It's especially sad because it results in brain drain. The saddest part of it is that there is no reason Facebook can't afford to pay the Dan Abramovs of the world the compensation they would get in the US. I'd like to better understand why the gap is so big.
boeingUH60 3y ago
What a silly, coping lie. A Facebook engineer in the US gets good private healthcare insurance.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  Hot-take: It's an emotional defence mechanism: on-the-whole the UK and US are far too similar and integrated that it's natural for middle-class Brits to larely consider themselves peers, and not near-peers, of their US counterparts - so when you have that view of yourself and your place in the world but then look at the stark the income disparity, you're going to comfort yourself with all of the bad things about the US (and the US' bad things are legion) - and invoking the egalitarian NHS happens because the UK gets its impression of the US healthcare "system" (industry?) from things like Michael Moore's Sicko or Times columnists reporting on all the messed-up healthcare injustices that happen in the US - but there is a very real ignorance of what healthcare is like in the US when the system does actually work well for you. And if it isn't NHS vs. "doesn't &everyone* get medical-bankruptcy?" then it'll be about guns, or the death penalty, or overt racism in the south, or corporate america's excesses, or US foreign-policy, and so on. Because those are the things that Channel 4 will report on - but you won't see or read stories that upset anyone's feelings on their place in the world: and it works on everyone: I've already mentioned Guardian-reading types, but also and especially the Brexit-types: who still desperately want to believe the British empire could be brought-back because the Daily Express told them so.
zarzavat 3y ago
As much as I like the NHS, it’s pretty shit compared to the healthcare a Facebook employee would get in the US. Wait weeks to see a GP, long waiting times to see a specialist or for treatment, rationing of access to technology like MRIs, and a risk of dying in a hospital car park or corridor, or being killed by an overworked A&E doctor. Don’t get me wrong, the NHS is great, I love that Boris Johnson got more or less the same care in St Thomas’ that a homeless person would have received (perhaps a bit better). But on an individual level, the FB engineer in US certainly has better care available to them than one in the UK.
- tchaffee 3y ago
  The one case where your argument fails is very serious illnesses where you can't continue to work. In the US you will end up with worse care. And let's hope the NHS problems are temporary. When I worked in London and the US ten years ago, I always preferred the NHS because the waiting times were shorter and the quality of care was much higher. I used the NHS a few weeks ago. It wasn't horrible and I got good quality of care within a reasonable time. But it's nothing close to how good it used to be so for the serious part of my care I went to the far better hospital in Brazil covered by my employer provided insurance. I would guess the NHS will change. Voters are unhappy with the reckless defunding of what used to be a national pride. The US does provide better care right now if you are rich or privileged enough to have a job that is in demand. But a well funded NHS is a far better system if the political will to get back to that exists.
  - RhysU 3y ago
    > ...very serious illnesses where you can't continue to work. In the US, if possible, carry long term disability insurance to mitigate this risk.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    > I would guess the NHS will change. Voters are unhappy with the reckless defunding of what used to be a national pride. I am not sure that is the case? The country seems to have a weird obsession with the NHS and seems to downplay/overlook its problems. Frankly even before its recent woes, I found it pretty shit compared to socialized healthcare in France. The current state of the NHS should prompt riots, yet everyone seems complacent in seeing their literal lifeline being destroyed by greedy, incompetent & senile oligarchs.
m4jor 3y ago
[flagged]
commonlisp94 3y ago
> he gets sick gets free healthcare Free at the cost of a significantly larger portion of his salary in tax for his entire life.
- tchaffee 3y ago
  The tax differences aren't that big, and they come with other nationalized services in addition to healthcare. Per capita healthcare costs in countries with nationalized healthcare can be 50% less than in the US. So you're getting much better value for your money when you pay taxes for that healthcare. https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-spending-u-s-compare-countries/ https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
  - commonlisp94 3y ago
    Ok, but that's a completely different argument than it being free.

sentinalien 3y ago

They're fairly competitive compared to the rest of the world. He is also working for a US company who could pay him more if they really wanted to. US salaries are high because the US has a glut of engineering jobs and is also a difficult place to immigrate to (generally requires you to have family ties or a job offer which is not easy to obtain when you might not be granted a work visa and won't realistically be able to start for about 6 months). If the US ever adopted a more lax immigration system in line with the UK, Canada, the EU etc I would expect US engineering salaries to drop.

kriro 3y ago
In what world is the post-Brexit UK immigration system lax?
- extraduder_ire 3y ago
  Compared to the US system of workers' visas, it's incredibly lax. Unless I'm misinformed. I haven't had to think about it much though, as I'm an Irish citizen and can come and go as I please.
tchaffee 3y ago
> They're fairly competitive compared to the rest of the world. That's accurate. But what surprises me is how much in demand software engineers are globally and how little they get paid in most countries. It doesn't make any sense to me that Dan Abramov could more than triple his salary at Facebook just by being employed by the US branch. The value he provides to the company would in no way change.