Hacker News Reader

Comment by tuyguntn | Hacker News Reader

Can not agree with "you're still over there because you're not good enough for anyone to sponsor you for an H1B".

There are 2 reasons I see now:

1. Living cost ratio. Well, you might get 10x salary comparing to Asian developer, but living cost is not at the same rate. 100x is different story, but again related to living cost, you might jump in there, when you get there you might end up with 101x living cost.

2. Assume every knowledgable person will leave their homes for 10x salary, 7x living cost and they are earning 3x of money and country will end up with idiots, slow development, slow financial growth in whole country. It takes some time for developing countries to be in decent place if professionals do not leave, it takes forever to be in good place if everyone will leave just for 3x or maybe 10x.

View on HN

> living cost is not at the same rate

I knew this was going to be brought up, but it's not enough to overcome the monumental salary gap. Your example of developers earning "$2k" just made me think that I invest $2k a month, not even what I save in total each month.

The living cost is obviously much different. There's still really just no comparison, in terms of net compensation.

> Assume every knowledgable person will leave their homes for 10x salary, 7x living cost and they are earning 3x of money and country will end up with idiots, slow development, slow financial growth in whole country

That's all well and good, and you're right, but the individual ends up being much better off by leaving. Brain drain, as it's called.

Rhetoric like "do it for your country" is good in theory, but individuals who leave have an opportunity to help themselves and their families out immensely via monetary gain.

It's really, really hard to ignore that.

Actually nope.

Cost of living matters. A lot.

It directly affects the kinds of things you can afford. Out here (in India), I can easily afford: house rent + groceries for a 2 bedroom apartment ( ~2000USD per year ), paying a cook to cook twice everyday ( 800USD per year ), paying someone to clean my house once a week. ( 200 USD per year ) and still manage to save up more than 50% of my paycheck - after paying 30% taxes.

Neither the places abroad offering me to move there nor any of my friends living there have these luxuries. That's why most of my friends working abroad want to come back to India "after making enough money". Especially the married folk, who are expecting babies.

Also the pay difference is really not as high as you'd think it is.Most decent companies (Google, Amazon, etc.. ) here pay you around 40k USD per year for a guy with 3-4 years experience. Most of my freelancer friends here seem to be making more than that actually.

And:

3. The number of good developers is unrelated to the number of H1-B issued

Reply on news.ycombinator.com