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Comment by vinni2 | Hacker News Reader

I know plenty of smart Germans who do not want to move to USA even for 4-5 times the salary.

Me too, but we've had a strong sequence of "the US is a horrible place to live" stories on the media for decades now, so that point of view is rarely objective.

I have friends that don't want to visit the US solely because of Trump being elected. Very smart software engineers.

Politics and worldview doesn't correlate at all with ones abilities, although this is often portrayed that way.

I don't doubt it, but for the very best the multiplier is greater than that, and not moving becomes harder. The difference is between lifetime wage slavery and financial independence at that point.

I’ve just moved to Berlin to look for software development work, and it’s nowhere near as bad as you are portraying.

Lower than the USA, yes; but even junior software roles are well above “wage slavery”. Housing and medical insurance are both much cheaper here (also food, but food is so cheap generally that it being cheaper here doesn’t make much difference, unlike rent and insurance).

Obviously this depends on the field and on your baseline in the US. I suppose if you made $100k/yr here, then making 60k euro there would not be that big of a deal, even though taxes are much higher. But if you made $500-700k/yr here in total comp (a realistic proposition for senior engineers in hot fields), such a move would be foolish. Remember, we’re not discussing the low end of the market here.

I would say, atleast from the people I meet, that there is less drive to maximize income. Once you have enough money to rent a nice apartment or house and spend some money on holidays and hobbies, most people I know don't really want any more money or not that much more.

It also helps that labor protection laws are rather strong here and when you look at the US, it's horrible in comparison and not to mention the potential healthcare/other costs that could eat up your wage (I guess with total comp you mean including stock options or something like that, I've rarely seen that here, people prefer to be actually paid).

That and moving to another country, possibly permanently is quite difficult and taxing.

> $500-700k/yr here in total comp (a realistic proposition for senior engineers in hot fields)

Sure, but that level is paid to maybe 1-in-25 staff/principal/distinguished engineers at the top handful companies which make up maybe 1-in-25 of total jobs in the industry (order of magnitude)?

So for the 1-in-500 talents in the German coding industry, maybe it might be a worthwhile consideration to move halfway across the world with their families, but for the 499 even doubling their salary isn't all that enticing...

But those tend to be the people who make or break your strategy. You know, the ones who pick the right vision and how to get there, which the others then can help implementing.

You don't really have a good army without decent generals.

500 and 700k is about the level of comp of Google’s Staff and Senior Staff levels correspondingly, assuming a high yearly review rating. Let me assure you, there are a lot more of them than you think, at Google and elsewhere. It is true that almost all of the engineers at those levels are exceptional however.

Ah, the classic hacker news big tech pay disbelief. People in big tech quote their pay everyone just assumes that it is impossible or extreme outliers. Those are indeed realistic numbers [0] and L3 through L7 are just the standard well outlined levels. The true outliers are the 4 levels above L7 which pay even more ridiculous amounts.

[0]: https://www.teamblind.com/article/google-engineer---total-co...

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