Anthropic doesn't have an image generator so neither can they

I can, but I'll also cost way less if you hire me for that instead of coding.

The cost of living varies a lot not only from country to country, but from city to city within the same country. But yes, it's the safety net that we have here. You don't go bankrupt if you have a medical emergency, your health care insurance isn't tied to your job, child support is better (varies by country), worker rights are stronger (varies by country, but on average it's better than the US), secured paid maternity leave, vacations, sick leave, etc. Generally speaking, if you live in Europe but work for a US company, you basically hit a lottery. As a software dev, at least.

FWIW a rule of thumb is that an employee costs a (US) company roughly twice what their annual salary is because of benefits, administrative costs, office space etc. That's still like 6 human engineers.

It could be just my biased view/experience.

I worked for a chinese startup in Beijing and we barely employed git or reviews, massive projects had 0 tests, we put 0 thoughts on architecture, just stop when it works.

I joined an established European company after that and the difference was huge, I had to relearn everything, proper code reviews, follow best practices, you don't stop when it works, you stop when it works, it's well tested (extensive business tests plus at least one required integration test for every change you make), iterated over the architecture a few times to have something simple to understand and clean.

I was also a contractor for another very new European startup where the process was not as robust but still better than the first one.