Side note: After 10 years living in Europe, I moved back to my home country and started looking for remote jobs in the US. It's wild what the US calls “quality of life”. In Europe, I had 6 weeks of vacation per year (from basically day 1) in the US, it’s 2 weeks! In Europe, unlimited sick leave is standard (with varying coverage by insurance); meanwhile, a US company bragging about being a “best place to work” was proudly offering 3 sick days per year! Absolutely crazy.
Where is "in Europe" in your case? There are around 50 countries, each with their own laws. In Finland, you don't get ANY vacation days until the next time April 1st rolls around. And then, the number of days you get is heavily reduced if you haven't worked the entire year from April-April. Why is it like that? Who the hell knows.
Oh yeah, if you take 5 days off, it counts as 6 days. So you essentially have 5/6 of the days that are promised to you on paper.
Generally speaking, whenever there's been an innovation that allows for efficiency gains since and including the industrial revolution, the US has opted to work as much (or more) and get cheaper goods, and the Euro zone has leaned more towards working less.
As much as I love the US, now that I have lived in both paces, I bet that quality of life in EU is much, much better for 90% of the population. 40k pickup or not.
