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Comment by herbst | Hacker News Reader

There are exceptions.

- There are plenty of smaller tech hubs with way higher quality of life like Zurich, Berlin

- Or others that are incredible affordable like Warsow, Bukarest, ..

- The USD is not looking healthy from CHFs perspective. I would have to expect to earn less every month.

- Getting paid from the US makes banking and taxes way more complicated. You can not even open a bank account without signing 3 times that your money does not come from the US.

- US companies have different values/ideas about social security/pension and co. Also work hours or more than 40 hour weeks

- I don't fully understand the diploma thing. You may think it is more important than it actually is in central Europe. It's common (because education is free or cheap), but by far not the only way to get in the Industrie.

My point is when you already live in modern place with high quality of living standards it's unlikely you'd find a US job, remote or not, tempting.

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Don't get cocky. In Europe you literally can't get a job paying 200.000€ per year as an individual contributor, except for US companies.

I'd be very happy to be proven wrong and for the respective position to not be a beyond-senior-contributor thing (so maybe 0.0001% of jobs out there).

I’d love to hear about those US based companies paying EU based ICs $200k / year and for the respective position to not be a beyond-senior-contributor thing (so maybe 0.0001% of jobs out there).

Switzerland, London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Munich, Luxembourg FAANG.

Without stock appreciation, I don't see that in Dublin.

Like, a friend recently got a FAANG offer for senior IC, which netted out at about 150k total compensation, which is far off from 200k.

You'd be looking at Staff (or years of stock appreciation) to hit 200k TC, which is a lot lower than one would expect in the US.

Anyone can go look at compensation data for Google, Facebook, and Amazon on levels.fyi, filtering on "Ireland", and see that every single data point for senior engineers is 200k+.

Out of 310 rows, 42 are $200k+. Not that many.

To be fair, I was looking at the numbers in Euros (which is the most relevant to me), while I suspect other people are looking in dollars.

It does appear that $200k is achievable in Dublin, Approximately $150k seems a lot more likely though.

Clearly, I need to give up on DS and become a software engineer. I suppose I could get a leetcode subscription and start back reading Knuth again ;)

If you filter all available data points to just those located in Ireland, you get 310.

I was speaking specifically of senior engineers at Google, Facebook, and Amazon (which are the only FAANGs to have meaningful presence in Ireland), because that was the context I was replying to.

At $200k+ for individual contributor? But it is probably effectively 0.0001% of the jobs across the EU zone.

That was my point if you read my comments again.

US companies in Europe pay that much, but there are only a handful of jobs (let's say 0.01% of jobs), and outside of US companies you can't even find that. Outside of US companies you need to be, as I called it "beyond-senior-level-individual-contributor", i.e. a god in your field to reach that. So you have to add 2 more zeroes after the dot, 0.0001%. They're both even rarer and also <<super>> hard to get.

> Don't get cocky. In Europe you literally can't get a job paying 200.000€ per year as an individual contributor, except for US companies

You can find these jobs in London. And there are plenty of examples of this in Amsterdam as well [1].

But the point is that in Europe you don't need to make as much as you'd have to make in the US to have the same or a higher quality of life.

If maximising your total compensation is your goal, then yeah you'll have to work in the US or for a US based company.

[1] https://techpays.eu/countries/netherlands#

I don't think that's necessarily true in terms of QOL. Some European cities are very expensive to live in when you factor in taxes, like Zurich, or real estate, like London. Other places in the US, especially outside of San Francisco, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, LA, &c. are quite economical to live in if you're making the standard US-scale engineer salary and working remote from somewhere less urban (or let's just say less "sexy" in terms of lifestyle). It really depends on where you're talking about, so I don't think generalizations like this are all that useful. But I do think you're right that if we're talking about maximizing total comp, the US is where engineers are going to gravitate.

> Some European cities are very expensive to live in when you factor in taxes, like Zurich, or real estate, like London.

Yes, but we have generally better public transport in EU so it's easier to live farther away.

Comparable housing in those places is at least as expensive as in similar US cities.

And to have a similar quality of life to the average US FAANG employee you will still need north of 120k € per year in my experience.

Plus in your list half the positions are exactly what I was talking about, higher than senior IC. You need to be incredibly skilled (top 0.5-1%) or incredibly lucky to get them. Though I appreciate that the other half is there :-)

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