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Comment by shiroiushi | Hacker News Reader

The girl who went to grad school in Ireland had the right idea, partly. She says the work-life balance is better there, and she had an easy time finding a job. But then she says she'd like to come back "home" to California. The Bay Area isn't going to magically become affordable anytime soon, so her best course of action is to stay in Ireland, a place that has apparently welcomed her and given her an opportunity for a better life than what California offers. Ironic that 100 or so years ago, the roles were reversed.

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I have to admit I moved from California to Ireland in 2013 and... I regret it. Irish salaries are a fraction of those in the US (even moreso as the Euro weakens), mortgages harder to obtain (and the houses are generally low quality), and it's not exactly a place that embraces risk taking. Though maybe if California continues to shoot itself in the foot w.r.t. housing more emigrants will bring new ideas to these places.

It was fun (and I like having a second passport now that I'm naturalised) but the opportunity cost was easily $2 million+ and my career is forever stunted. It also is a one-way move. Once you're gone too long you'll never be able to compete with your peers for housing in the bay.

Strange, I feel like that it doesn’t matter anymore where you live because there are many more remote jobs than 10 or 20 years ago. And tech salaries give much more purchasing power outside SV.

Right, but I wasn't making bay area salaries, I was making Irish salaries at first, then a split between Irish and US when I was working remote. This means €65k instead of $165k. On top of that, I had one lucky break (Okta bought Auth0) and while the stock was nice, it was all taxed at 52%. The upshot of all this is that over the course of ten years I would almost certainly have made a couple million more (especially if I had invested decently or bought a house) than I did in Ireland, and while I like living in Europe (though not Ireland, I couldn't wait to leave by the end), being able to FIRE by 40 would have been better.

2013 was a quite bad moment to move into Ireland. It was very hard hit by the crisis. Right now salaries are way better: https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...

I moved in 2020 and it has been the best decision I could have made. Taking into account everything (savings rate, safety, working hours, job security, politics, closeness to my home country in Europe) it is the best place I could be by far.

All other places trade off too much in exchange of something else. For example, I would have better savings rate in California (maybe 60-100k instead of 30-50k a year), but it would be worse in every other metric, except perhaps weather, although I dislike hot weather.

I'm always surprised at someone born with a foot up advantage, voluntarily moving from California to somewhere like Ireland. The weather is atrocious, salaries low, cost of living very high, etc.

Sure, it's a fun adventure, but maybe just for 6 moths to a year.

A close friend of mine did this about 25 years ago, and he considers it one of the best things he's ever done. His description of Ireland is "if you ignore the weather, this place is as close to a paradise as I'm likely to see".

It may not be for everybody (nothing is), but it is for some.

I loved it for five years but after having kids it was horrible, for me at least. Holland has been vastly superior.

In 2013 I had a flat across from Dublin castle for €800 a month and the craic was, indeed, mighty.

If you’re born in California it’s easy not to realise how special it is.

The weather is nice. Economic opportunity is crazy good, network effects are weirdly magical. Housing crisis is fucked. Traffic is fucked. Government is excessively bossy. SF planning department is corrupt and pathological.

I left and don’t regret it one bit. Different strokes for different folks.

I just came across a comment of yours (1 yr ago) on setting up an LLC in California as I'm about to pull the trigger/looking for recommendations on who to choose for formation/setting up etc

You mentioned not to do it in SF! This thread is kinda of connected - do you mind elaborating on why not to setup your LLC in SF?

The food is pretty damn good too.

Agreed with the first half of your comment. However

> Traffic is fucked. Government is excessively bossy. SF planning department is corrupt and pathological.

Traffic is horrible everywhere, unless it's a few European cities with great public transport. But their governments make CA govt look tame by comparison.

> SF planning department is corrupt and pathological.

Couldn't agree more. Though it is easy to avoid SF and stay in the nicer parts of SFBA.

People in America talk so much about how certain people have "privileges" over others, when one of the biggest privileges in the world - and one of the most sought after - is being American. I can see this clearly having grown up outside the US, but I'm often stunned when people here don't realize that. Even a poor person in the US is fairly rich by world standards, even if compared to big chunks of Europe.

Unless you're grinding in a startup the worklife balance is way better in the USA for tech. Income is so low in Ireland especially in terms of housing cost, yes it's even worse then the bay, that she's probably just making a mistake in the math somewhere.

I say this as an Irish citizen. I've done the math dozen of times.

>Unless you're grinding in a startup the worklife balance is way better in the USA for tech

That doesn't really pass the sniff test without some supporting data, given the work culture norms and labor laws that I'm familiar with. Just quickly searching for one example, full time employees in Ireland get 4 weeks of vacation a year, and in the US you'll be lucky to take 2-3 weeks a year, and not legally mandated either. Depending on the state, you may not even be entitled to sick days.

OP said "for tech". Tech jobs have long had much better vacation time and other benefits than "regular" jobs in the US. However, with the way things are going, this may not last and I wouldn't count on it. Also, it seems to depend a lot on employer: working at a big place like Apple or Google will of course get you lots of vacation time, but working at some shitty little 30-person company will probably get you the regular 2 weeks, and these days, the good jobs are probably a lot more scarce, forcing more tech employees to work at those shitty companies.

>Tech jobs have long had much better vacation time

Yeah, no.

Google is 3 weeks/year, and has been that way for as far as I have known it.

KLA+ (formerly, KLA-Tencor) has several (IIRC, 3) weeks of sick days and vacation COMBINED, so if you get sick, no vacation for you.

Those are representative examples.

There are also quite a few companies that offer “unlimited” vacation, but in practice they pressure/shame their employees not to take “too much” time off.

When Cadence switched to "unlimited" vacations, my manager straight up told me that he expects it to be three weeks unless I exceed his expectations, or it will adversely affect my performance reviews.

Which is how it effectively works, except usually managers are less direct.

That doesn't seem right. I have more at amazon. Meta also has more. I've never heard of KLA.

Just looked it up and the number of days increases with seniority at Google.

>never heard of KLA

KLA, ASML, TSMC are companies that are huge globally in their fields.

The field being semiconductor design and fabrication.

Whatever device you're reading this on almost certainly has components made with machinery by one (or all) of those.

With all the stuff about chips and fabs and Taiwan in the news in the past year, you'd have to be living under a rock to not know who TSMC and ASML are.

However, I too have never heard of KLA. Somehow it never gets mentioned alongside those other companies. Maybe it's similar to how everyone knows about Microsoft and Apple, and even my mother knows what Linux is, but almost no one has heard of Green Hills Software?

I don't know what's common knowledge, but comparison to Green Hills doesn't hold.

KLA makes wafer inspection and process control equipment and has very little (if any) competition in what they do. They're big.

As in, they have 10B revenue and 15,000 employees.

That's roughly 1/3 of what ASML is (ASML has 30B revenue and 45K employees).

It's more like your grandma knowing about Nintendo, but not Valve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KLA_Corporation

This is in line with my experiences, as well.

> Google is 3 weeks/year, and has been that way for as far as I have known it.

Not true. Google starts at 3 weeks/year but that increases quickly after a few years. I was getting 5 weeks/year when I left.

Ireland has such a horrendous housing situation that I left for another country with a housing crisis (the Netherlands) and it felt like easy mode by comparison. €2450 for a nice 5 bed house a 20 minute train ride from Amsterdam Centraal vs some mouldy dump in Kildare that you need to fight off 100 people to get.

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