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Comment by jjevanoorschot | Hacker News Reader

> 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#

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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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