>If you define pay as something that you can spend when you deduce tax, health, pension, rent/mortgage, education of children I'm not sure that US offers double.
I define pay the way most people define pay. The gross amount paid to you by your employer per pay period.
>And even if it were double in absolute numbers, so is the number of working hours per year of software engineer in US compared to Germany.
Unless the average German software engineer works 20-25 hours a week, I'd love to see some statistics on this. According to OECD stats, US workers work 30% more hours than Germans. There's no reason to believe that's different for software devs (in fact, especially on the west coast, it probably trends in the opposite direction).
I define pay the way most people define pay. The gross amount paid to you by your employer per pay period.
>And even if it were double in absolute numbers, so is the number of working hours per year of software engineer in US compared to Germany.
Unless the average German software engineer works 20-25 hours a week, I'd love to see some statistics on this. According to OECD stats, US workers work 30% more hours than Germans. There's no reason to believe that's different for software devs (in fact, especially on the west coast, it probably trends in the opposite direction).
http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS
I was also unaware rent and mortgages are free in Germany. Why do you not have to take those into account?