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Comment by markplindsay | Hacker News Reader

I've always read that Singapore is NOT a great place for startups, and that software jobs don't pay well vs. the cost of living.

I would love to hear otherwise because I've always wanted to live and work there.

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The rule of thumb is that engineering and startup talent pool is going to be severely restricted-people will revert to job security at larger corporations due to the depressed wages, especially for engineers.

This was actually a big reason why I turned down the opportunity to do a startup in Asia, there's very few unicorns and exits, and while living standards might be very good in places like Singapore, I felt like it would be hard to find a marketplace like the United States.

Most of my Asian Canadian friends have moved to Shanghai to pursue high tech work and hyping China and frankly I just didn't buy any of that ideological/racial bullshit. At the end of the day, North America still remains a very open and multicultural place (West Coast at least) that makes it easy to do business with a diverse group of people which is far more exciting (for me anyways) without having to travel.

Despite Trump, I feel like entering the US market is a far more exciting. I think the US economy will experience another major surge while Russia slowly goes into bankruptcy (again) and China implodes under it's debt/sociopolitical unrest that follows.

I'm doubling down on North America over China & Asia-providing jobs in Canada and United States with the expectation that I will see yuge returns.

China is in a totally different league though. There's nothing else like it in the world today. Completely understandable that not everyone can or want to go there (especially since there are also many downsides), but you can't take that away from them.

It isn't. I lived the for three years. A series of hiring managers who were fairly clueless about software hiring software developers & poor offered salaries made me leave in the end.

That environment obviously doesn't attract great talent, so unless the quality of your software isn't important, it will be a poor place to found or move a startup to.

The weather and food are amazing though.

the digital nomads can work remotely, so some of them just do their work in Singapore while their employers are not there. It's true that the pay there wasn't that great for (I worked there 14 years ago), but the cost of living is on the low end if you live outside the central area.

Uhm, I think you're overthinking it. There's million other challenges and reasons why you might not like Singapore (or another similar city). If you can and want to go you should go.

I like Singapore very much! I think it is a very livable city in a fascinating region. They have a straightforward visa process for skilled foreign workers, and a path to permanent residency.

But I'm not interested in taking a ~50% pay cut to move there from NYC when the cost of living is not that much different.

Pay is such a variable thing though. I mean, just being able to move, dealing with everything and ending up liking it long term is such a statistical anomaly that it seems silly to generalize pay (even though there might not necessarily be a correlation between the two). I would at least look into things like working for a US company in Singapore or consulting/freelancing (since the taxes are low?). Often things look quite different on paper than in reality (especially on an individual level).

It is a London of Asia. You can get around but it is not that great.

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