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Comment by michaelhalligan | Hacker News Reader

$110k seems a tad low for someone with over a decade's experience in the bay area. I'd be looking for more around $150k/year in wage slavery as an overall comp package (bonuses and expected stock sale value added to base salary)

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http://payscale.com/ and http://glassdoor.com/ suggest that the median is lower, not higher.

But that's not even the point. With $110k you'll live more than great here, and if you're good you can always find new opportunities or a raise.

Unless you have better alternatives, go for it - i'd trade a lot of income to live here rather than back home :)

IANAIL, but I expect that being on (presumably) an H1B will severely limit the OP's ability to shop around for new opportunities or raises.

Perhaps, but staying in the UK is in some ways even more limiting.

Having just gone on a trip to Ireland, I'd do it just to get away from the dank darkness that pervades those northern lands:-)

Can't UK citizens / permanent residents work anywhere in the EU?

Sure, but objectively, it's probably easier and more remunerative in many ways to work for Google in the Bay Area than, say, seek out a job in Sicily, where the weather is certainly wonderful, but there are not many IT jobs and they generally aren't of the interesting variety (unless you did something, like, say, create Redis, in which case you can happily stay in Sicily and hack on your project:-). Not to mention the language barrier and cultural differences.

Our move from Padova to Innsbruck, Austria, 4 hours away by car, was far, far more difficult than when I moved from Portland, Oregon to the Bay Area years ago. For instance, there are no one-way rental trucks in Europe that I know of, so if you have furniture or things to move, it's going to be expensive and/or time-consuming.

Trucking is hidelously expensive on the continent. No idea why. Shipping will be WAY cheaper in any port city. You'd be better off probably getting rid of your stuff and just getting new stuff (used, Ikea, whatever).

Renting a van isn't that expensive here. The problem is that you can't, say, rent it in Innsbruck and drop it off in Padova, but you have to drive down to Padova, rent the van, drive it back up to Innsbruck in the middle of the night in a snow storm over the Brenner pass, with the unloaded rear wheels not getting a lot of traction, load it up, and then drive it back down to Padova.

Part of the problem with these kinds of surveys is it's hard to know if you're comparing apples to oranges.

- Are they surveying base salary? Or total compensation? Or perhaps just including bonuses?

- Are the surveys voluntary? Life has taught me people lie about their income all the time.

His overall package isn't $110k. It's that plus GSUs, which apparently vest at about 1/4 of the units per year, so an extra $25.7k/yr for a $135.7k package not counting bonuses.

If you read the original post, $110k is the base salary, which means total comp is probably closer $170k.

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