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What is deducted from a salary in Poland apart from Income tax? [155]
Poland doesn't appear on the top ten list for any quality of life indicators, except perhaps racial and ethnic homogeneity, if you consider that conducive to quality of life. It offers nothing special that numerous other countries do not offer in greater abundance, with far less drawbacks.
You're again trying to apply statistical ideas to human nature, which simply doesn't work. For instance, lazy people like myself happen to enjoy the Polish culture towards July/August - where simply nothing happens as no-one can be bothered, even if they're in work. I've seen it in many large corporations and even spoken to many company directors who all say the same thing - nothing happens in Poland in July and August and that it's a waste of time trying to do so. For me, that's nice. Can you measure it? Not really. But on a personal level, it's worth a considerable amount of cash.
Means jack $hit. It's far behind and still has a long, long way to go before it even nips at the coattails of the top and second-tier players, and that's not going to be in five or ten years. More like thirty to fifty, optimistically. Don't forget the other players are growing, too.
They're not growing, this is rather the point. Look at the data for the last 10 years - you can see that Poland is just pushing and pushing all the time. As it stands, Poland is the Lance Armstrong of countries - aided with drugs, but still performing at such a ridiculously high level that it's not funny. The challenge is to make sure that there's a future from 2021 onwards. We don't have crystal balls, so all we can do is observe that the money is pouring into Poland.
There are plenty of other countries out there that offer much better opportunities for work/life balance
Where? The Nordic countries and the UK are obvious, but their weather sucks. Germany always comes up, but then you have to adopt German work practices which drive many people insane because it's so damned efficient. Austria? Maybe, but your neighbours will hate you behind your back. France? Maybe, but their taxation regime is punishing. And so on.
If I was choosing, I'd live in Finland - but that's because I like the country and their attitude to life. However, there are immense drawbacks, such as not being able to simply get in your car and drive somewhere nice.
Having lived in both countries, it was my impression that Poles, in general, were much more obsessed about money and working than Americans.
I'd agree on the money point (Poles are materialistic, there's no getting away from that) - but with work, most of them seem to specialise in finding ways to do as little as possible.
. And they were much more paranoid about losing their jobs.
Common problem in Europe, not just Poland. The UK in particular has horrific issues with it. I think it's only really Germany that has any concept of 'long-term employment' anymore.
In any case, job satisfaction in Poland is abysmal compared to the States and Western Europe, which is why so many Polish engineers leave the country for greener pastures.
They leave because they're offered so much money that they can't say no, which says a lot about how highly they're valued.
As for job satisfaction - ever considered that such a measure might be also affected by culture? Americans are much cheerier, happier people by nature - Polish Catholic fatalism means that *everything* is terrible even when it's not. I know one guy that quit his job because - believe it or not - his boss wouldn't agree to let him work on his car in the company parking garage. Apparently because of that, his boss was a "egotistical maniac" and so on - yet when I questioned him, everything else was fine, just he wanted to do car repairs in the parking garage because he didn't have a covered garage at home.
