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Comment by benhurmarcel | Hacker News Reader

That's not a great plan if what they're looking for is a higher salary though. Engineering in western Europe doesn't pay nearly as well as in the US.

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Yes but Toulouse is way cheaper than any Tier 1 city in the US and you have to include insurance/health, school cost in the US (I'm from Toulouse and living in the US for more than 10 years). If you make 250k/year in Tier 1 city in the US it's probably as good as making 80k/year in Toulouse.

Don't Boeing engineers also get insurance and 401k from their employer?

Plus, they'd have to learn french also. France is not very accommodating to non French speaking foreigners. Trying to get around in life with just English there outside of Paris is not easy.

There are quite a few employees in Toulouse that don't speak French, the company is very international. That being said I agree that daily life is much easier if you speak at least a little bit.

That's funny you say that because my experience of France is that everyone outside of Paris seems to hate the Parisians more than me, an American.

My experience, although 20ish years ago now, was that France was very accommodating to people who were trying to make an effort to speak French, however badly, and would help correct pronunciations and other little errors, whereas their patience for foreigners who thought that the locals English would get better if they just spoke more loudly and slowly was thin.

> France is not very accommodating to non French speaking foreigners. Trying to get around in life with just English there outside of Paris is not easy.

I don't really get this kind of comments... Usually people also say the same thing when visiting Japan. "This restaurant only has menu in Japanese and staff only speaking Japanese!!".

That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it? In the US, apart from places with say huge Spanish speaking presence, you better interact in English.

Try "getting around in life" using only say French, or Portuguese, or Japanese in a random US city like Portland, NYC, or Chicago.

> That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it?

No it's not, western Europe for example has a bunch of countries where English is almost as good as native. But obviously that's not the common case across the world, and like you say there's nothing wrong with expecting people to know the local language.

Not really, the world isn't either black or white but various shades of gray. Everything North of Benelux is a lot friendlier and open to speaking English and doing things in English outside of capitals, compared to places like France where not speaking it gives you a severe handicap in life and career.

I didn't sense any judgement there, just a statement of fact. Learning a new language as an adult is doable, but not trivial, so it's certainly a factor in making a decision to relocate to another country for a job.

>That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it?

That has not been my experience. I'm not arguing it should be this way, but for better or worse I've gotten by very well with english virtually anywhere with tourists and most places without. I lived in east ukraine for two years and learned russian - enough people spoke english there that at times it could be hard to get practice time in russian. This was with a younger student crowd, most non-students and older people did not speak english, but the point stands that you can find english speaking people and get by in most situations.

But if I save money in the US I can decide to spend it anywhere else in the world later, including places that are much cheaper than Toulouse.

If I make money in Toulouse then I had better really love Europe, since I will have limited resources to relocate elsewhere if I ever change my mind.

Tl;dr one advantage of getting paid in money over services is that money is much more portable.

You can buy houses outside of Toulouse for 300k with swimmingpool and 4000 square meter land. 20 min drive from Airbus. Winter time you can ski in the mountains, summers are nice and cities like Barcelona can be reached in 4,5 hours. 80k is more than enough to have a super comfortable life.

> If you make 250k/year in Tier 1 city in the US it's probably as good as making 80k/year in Toulouse.

If you are making $250k/year, you are already getting health insurance, and even if you weren't, it doesn't cost $170k.

- Engineering jobs in the US tend to come with health insurance benefits

- There are several state programs in the US that make attending an in-state public university very affordable. For example, in GA I attended university for $0 in tuition (only paying for room and board + a couple hundred bucks a semester on bs “fees”). The requirement for that grant is getting a 3.0 or higher high school GPA.

- Not sure how cheap Toulouse is, but at least in the US you’re probably better off making 200k+ in HCOL than 100k in LCOL. At that level of income, you don’t have to spend much of your income on essentials even in an extremely HCOL area like SF ($3000 a month gets you a nice apartment).

True, as long as you don't consider cost of living, quality of life, work/life balance and life expectancy.

But judging by the current policies and laws (or lack of them) in the US, seemingly "high salary" goes above all of those things for most people.

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