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Comment by amirathi | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Amazon engineer here. Worked for ~4 years in the Prime Music team. Contrary to popular belief, I had incredible time at Amazon. Learned a lot, good work life balance, progressed to L5 etc. Primary reason I quit is to start something of my own and not live under a draconian H1-B visa that treats people like second class citizens (will save H1-B rant for some other time).

What am I doing now?

I enjoy building dev tools. I am currently building ReviewNB (https://reviewnb.com) that helps with Jupyter Notebook diffs and commenting. I built https://nurtch.com earlier this year to help Dev/Ops teams write executable incident runbooks.

How?

I moved back from Seattle to New Delhi, India. Cost of living is less than $2000 per month which gives me enough time to work on my projects without being stressed financially.

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$2k/mo seemw very high for India (I'm not too familiar), are you supporting a family/spouse as well or is New Delhi just expensive?

It must be, because I'm living comfortably in NY on less than $2000 a month post tax 0.o

Yeah, same here in the bay area.

And like, I know plenty of people in the US living decently well on $1,000 a month post tax. Most college towns will have bedrooms for like $350-550 a month.

If you are fortunate enough to live in a very progressive town like Chapel Hill NC, which has a completely free bus system for everyone (paid for by student tuition, state taxes, and grants), then you can get around for pretty much free. The rest could be spent on food and health insurance if one chooses

He must be living like a king. I lived there for a year and struggled to spend more than $20 a day.

South Delhi is expensive. I pay $1000/month on rent. That's also because I have a larg'ish space (home office, guest room etc.)

Living in tier 2 Indian cities or suburban areas can cut down the expense in half. ~$1000/month for a comfortable lifestyle.

Ah I see. Yeah, to do <2k in the bay area either roommates or studio + ramen :P

I do not think so. Yes, it is ok if you are single but in India and earn 2k/mo, but remember everything is paid for and conditions are not very friendly. e.g. In Delhi you will most likely need a car (unless you WFH or live next to the office) and the fuel prices are among the highest in the world. You have to pay and save for your kids education (which can be pretty steep). Because of the heat and pollution, you have to invest in air-conditioning, air-purifier, water-purifier and the list keeps going on for a comfortable life. Also no health or social safety net means you have to maintain decent savings at all times.

Finally, the real inflation (not the official one) is high and any saving could potentially be worthless in a few years (except real-estate which is why it has absurd prices) which also means owning a home is quite hard.

Saving this comment as I might go down the same route a few years from now.

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