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Comment by thr0waway2 | Hacker News Reader

London wasn't that great when it comes to tech jobs compared to US/Canada. Starting salary for grads at FANGs is around a third of what it is at large US cities when living costs are no more than 30-40% lower for example. Compared to rest of Europe London is a lot better with notable exception of Switzerland which is a non-EU country. So to me it would seem that membership in EU is not a necessary condition for good tech jobs with competitive pay.

I'd be a lot more worried about the general shift to working from home than leaving EU when it comes to London's importance as a tech center.

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I always feel like salary comparisons are a little biased by a slightly US-centric definition of a comfortable lifestyle (e.g. including a car, parking, bigger house requirements, etc) as well as underestimating some built-in benefits of other countries like free healthcare.

Are there good sources out there that would afford a holistic cost comparison of a typical London lifestyle (Tube, 1-bedroom in Zone 1-2, weekend abroad in Europe, etc.) vs SF, LA or NY for instance?

Otherwise agree that long-term the work from home trend could be slightly more concerning, but this won't materialise as soon as most think. There is still a lot of value in being physically close to networks of influence and decision-makers, which in the UK would very much still remain in London.

>as underestimating some built-in benefits of other countries like free healthcare.

If you're at FAANG (which the original post was talking about) then there's little advantage of free healthcare imho. You get top of the line company paid for healthcare. You can see a top specialist in a week with no referrals needed and someone almost as good same day.

That is a given for every resident in most European countries.

Edit: it seems I am wrong. I commented a bit too fast.

That's not true. For example in Germany there is an explicit difference between statutory healthcare and private healthcare. Private healthcare will get you to the front of the line and will give you easy access to all services. With statutory healthcare you will have to go around searching for specialists who have time for you, as most will refuse you on account of them being "fully booked".

I'm a German with statutory healthcare.

> most [specialists] will refuse you on account of them being "fully booked"

I don't deny that this does happen, but it's not as inevitable as you make it sound. I've seen about a dozen separate specialists over the years for various reasons, and have never had such problems. There were a few outliers where I had to wait several weeks for an appointment, but that was only for non-urgent matters and I was never refused service. In most cases, I can get an appointment within 1-5 days of calling the doctor's office.

My suspicion is that such overload as you describe is a regional issue, so if, as an immigrant, you need to rely on certain specialists because of chronic ailments, it may be worth to investigate the availability of the relevant specialist doctor beforehand.

>That is a given for every resident in most European countries.

Based on what I've heard it's not a given in the UK for example. Need non-guaranteed GP referral (ie: they may say no) for a specialist and there's often a long waiting period.

Even if it were a given, the point I believe they were trying to make was in addition to the much larger salary, they ALSO have good healthcare

That’s a really good point. My understanding however was that you still need to pay some parts of the treatments, even with top healthcare?

I’m no specialist on the US system, so could be wrong, but I heard from a friend who paid $4K cash for a broken ankle (arguably out of a total bill of $25K+, and not sure what type of healthcare they had), whereas your bill in the U.K., France or Spain for the same injury would be exactly zero (as an example, from countries I know better). The same would be true, I believe, for child birth for instance (again, I could be wrong as relying on second-hand accounts in both cases).

Agreed on the type of specialist you would get in the U.K., although in my experience it’s always been very feasible to see top specialists when warranted, even on public healthcare. You would typically get faster access for non-essential care on a private basis though.

Overall, it seems from Yours and other comments that the salary multiple in U.S. tech specifically may still be significant and would probably make these moot.

>I’m no specialist on the US system, so could be wrong, but I heard from a friend who paid $4K cash for a broken ankle (arguably out of a total bill of $25K+, and not sure what type of healthcare they had), whereas your bill in the U.K., France or Spain for the same injury would be exactly zero (as an example, from countries I know better)

UK, yes. In France, aren't there copayments? I thought the French system typically covers 70% of hospital bills.

Agree direct comparison is tough and multifactored and would be highly individual (how do you put a price on being a 2 hr train ride away from Paris whilst having much better job opportunities than Parisians). However, given that compensation in US is a large multiple higher I think it would be easy to agree it's better overall. For comparison Big Law pays 20-30% lower on average in London vs. NYC and finance pays marginally lower (outside of quant finance where London pays a lot lower than NYC as hedge funds don't have to compete with FANGs for tech talent that wants high pay).

I get the impression US salaries usually come out way ahead for software people (in other fields, not so much).

The only point where it starts to get questionable is when you consider stuff like, how much would you pay to live in a city that doesn't have needles all over the sidewalks, or, what is the value of living in a society that isn't brutally unfair and visibly dystopian?

Personally, I put a pretty high value on abstract stuff like fraternity and equality, and I feel like it has a really good effect on quality-of-life, but I can also see why people just go for the biggest paycheck. If you're planning on living in a kind of bubble, and just ignore the wider social context, you don't really need to live in a functioning society.

US is a nation of immigrants where you can basically fully integrate in a matter of months. In non-English speaking countries this is impossible. If you put a lot of weight on fraternity and equality you have to consider that if you move to France or Germany you will always be "that foreigner who moved here".

Just something more to consider. Although I do agree also with your post.

You're absolutely right. There are, however, bubbles - I don't know about France, but there are few cities in Germany where you aren't made to feel 'foreign' unless you go to a government office or something. Of course you do occasionally bump into racists, and the concept of integration in Germany is, well, 'assimilation' (literally), but like most countries in Europe, it's very variable.

While this might be true, this is not what I've experienced. I lived in the US for 7 years. I went to school there, worked there and paid taxes. But I had to leave because I didn't get the H1B visa. So while people couldn't tell I was a foreigner, as far as immigration is concerned, I was always a foreigner. Even if I would have gotten the H1B visa, as someone born in India, it would have taken me 20+ years to get a green card...

Yes of course I by no means implied that there are no obstacles involved in immigrating to the US. The OP was talking about the more social aspects so I wanted to remark about an often overlooked aspect.

Yeah, I understand what you mean. I just wanted to point out that often this aspect is also overlooked when it comes to immigration in America. The social aspects mean nothing to me when I could never be certain about my status in the US. In fact if I'd not integrated as much socially, I'd probably be much happier in life right now after having been forced to leave. On the other hand I completely agree with you about the social aspect. I'm worried about how I will fit in to Europe once I move there, and whether I will always be considered a foreigner. I'm trying to convince myself that it's the better choice for me since I was forced to move there. But at the end of the day, I can't help thinking that Europe just doesn't have the same diversity and open culture as California did when I lived there. Who knows, maybe I will be pleasantly surprised when I go there. However, like I said before, in Europe I have certainty about my immigration status. As a highly skilled migrant, I don't have to keep worrying about "What happens if I don't get the H1B visa", "It's been 10 years, and I still haven't received the priority date for my Green Card".

>If you're planning on living in a kind of bubble, and just ignore the wider social context, you don't really need to live in a functioning society.

Your example is also about a bubble. It's not social context but your own personal sense of happiness that you're talking about as I see it. You can have clean streets and little crime but be a dystopian society. Singapore and Japan come to mind. Muslim refugees in France would see society very differently than a native french person. Talking about others living in bubbles seems to me to be just a way to makes oneself feel better about the bubble one lives in themselves.

You might be right - that said, there's no comparison when it comes to poverty between where I live now (east germany) and where I come from (London). Poor people in London are simply far more poor, even though London is far more wealthy than east Germany.

What I was initially pointing at was, if you think about the portion of pay one gets, and the portion of pay that goes to the state, I think high taxation is often worth the money in terms of quality of life, because it delivers goods that are simply beyond anybody's budget otherwise. Jeff Bezos can't go on a 4am walk through LA without a shadow of worry, but I can do that in my city. That's a tangible freedom that I can buy with my paycheck, and he cannot really buy with his.

Obviously money on its own doesn't solve deeper issues - and Europe has a lot of problems, especially around questions of nationality and belonging. But I think in the narrow sense, of what you get for what you pay, high tax - welfare state societies are generally competitive even for very high earners, just because they deliver a lot of things that you literally can't pay for, no matter how rich you are.

>That's a tangible freedom that I can buy with my paycheck, and he cannot really buy with his.

Sure he can, his multiple well armed guards will ensure he is safe even in the worst part of LA at 4am. He also has multiple homes and I guarantee you that his suburban homes have little crime around them. Cities aren't primarily where the well off live in the US and the places they do live are very safe.

The typical London lifestyle for people with a respectable income -- tech money, not finance money -- is more like living in Zone 3 and working in Zone 1. I think there is a lot of proportionality between standard of lifestyle and income between London and expensive US cities, a similar level of income buying a similar lifestyle (adjusted for local context). A big difference is that high incomes are much more widely distributed across industries in the US than London. If you are a middle manager in a boring industry like publishing, you aren't going to get £150k in London but you can in the US, even outside the big cities. The diversity of people that can afford an upper-middle class lifestyle in the US is much greater. Even dialing back US standards of lifestyle to something contextually appropriate, the kind of work that affords a "comfortable" lifestyle is much narrower in London.

An under-rated feature of US cities is the diversity of occupations that can command relatively high incomes. London does this better than many European cities but it still has a long way to go. Living on a tech salary in London is a bit like living on a good non-tech salary in SF or Seattle. Comfortable in the abstract but there is visibly a tier of people that the city culture values much more.

> An under-rated feature of US cities is the diversity of occupations that can command relatively high incomes.

I find this super interesting, especially when linking salary back to how much society values that job type. For instance it seems that many European countries value societally their teachers and professors, yet it is a rather underpaid profession, all things considered. Similarly, a maitre d’ would be quite well regarded in France or Italie, yet would not command a high-salary.

Thus it feels like your point on there being more diverse sectors being cogent with a comfortable lifestyle in the U.S. rings true.

Veering away from the main point, but I wonder if, as pointed in other comments, that is somewhat balanced by less people being, comparatively, in the poor and very poor category. That is to say, less of a difference between top lifestyles and bottom lifestyles overall. I would need to properly research that though, as salary alone won’t give us that variance.

A large part of the income distribution differences result from wages being very compressed around the median for a given occupation in Europe. For most occupations in the US, the top 5% earn much more money than the median person in their occupation (or the population generally), even for occupations like waiters and cleaners that we don't think of as high-paying. This creates a different set of expectations culturally; everyone knows at least a few enterprising people that make a surprising amount of money doing nominally low-wage, low-status work and therefore having access to a visibly comfortable life.

I think "poor" is relative to cultural expectations, so I am not sure how to measure that over different geographic regions. The infamously poverty-stricken regions of the US, like Appalachia or Mississippi, really do have serious systemic poverty but even the middle-class there is often viewed as poor by the standards of other regions. However, the lifestyle afforded by the 40th percentile household income in most European countries would identify as "poor" in much of the US, despite being definitionally middle-class. In much of the US, "poverty" is primarily associated with social problems like drugs and crime, not economic resource issues per se outside of a few sparsely populated regions, which isn't that different than what I see in Europe. I grew up in abject poverty of non-social kind, which is pretty rare in the US. In hindsight, I think the government did a reasonable job of handling that case.

>A big difference is that high incomes are much more widely distributed across industries in the US than London.

[...]

>An under-rated feature of US cities is the diversity of occupations that can command relatively high incomes.

The way I've explained this to people is that it's entirely possible in the US to rise to the top of your profession in any industry without ever moving to NY or LA, except maybe finance for NY and film/television for LA.[1] The equivalent is possible in Australia, Canada, and Germany, but impossible in the UK or France.

[1] And even here there are exceptions. For the entirety of the century that Hollywood has been "Hollywood", the creative types in LA have worked under control of the money men in NY. This is still true, except that the money men are now also in Dallas (AT&T), Philadelphia (Comcast), or Tokyo (Sony). In finance, one can become a managing director at a New York investment bank while always based in a regional office like Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, or San Francisco (I think Byron Trott never left Chicago during his Goldman career).

Swiss tech companies find that there isn't enough talent within Switzerland unless they are focusing purely on the Swiss market. Cost of living is higher than London in somewhere like Geneva. For growing US tech companies, what is the main reason why they want to open a tech office in Europe? If it's just regulatory / business / tax stuff, there's no need to employ developers: it could just be business & legal side. If it's access to talent then London is still great. Perhaps that will decline as it won't be as easy to bring EU citizens over to work there. I know that the Silicon Valley salaries can be several times higher than in London, but for some Europeans it just doesn't seem super attractive to live and work in the US.

Switzerland does have freedom of movement with the EU so thinking it's a "non-EU country" in terms of talent access is incorrect

FANG salaries and financial rewards aren't relevant to most software engineers, though the proportion may be higher on HN.

Realistic salaries more generally also can't be taken out of the wider context of living in a country with different social values and funding of them (I'm trying to be polite in reference to the comparative British/European vs USA perspectives of and funding with regard to social support and social disparities).

Switzerland is not that great either I believe. Looked it up last year, I could make ~1.5 times what I make now, but prices are on average at least 2 times higher than where I live now.

Taxes are very low, though.

I would agree to this about working from home. But this applies every city as well - New York being notable because of the mass emigration during COVID.

I think most NY exits went to NJ by a good train line. NY should be fine.

London beats any European city by a substantial amount, even including cost of living. I don't see why that would change. Switzerland as you point out has similarly high wages.

I can't see innovation, talent or companies moving to the EU at any stage. It's a regulatory horror show and has massive brain drain to places that actually pay developers reasonable wages.

Developers in Sweden are paid the equivalent of 51k USD. This means even including cost of living such as health insurance, you can make substantially more in the US, London or Switzerland.

Developers in the EU get shafted big time. Free health insurance is not worth half, or even one-third the salary.

> Developers in the EU get shafted big time. Free health insurance is not worth half, or even one-third the salary.

It’s called solidarity

The money saved does not go into the healthcare. The healthcare is paid from taxes paid from salaries etc. So the bigger the salary the more funding for healthcare.

I’m not complaining about the situation. Supply and demand determines IT wages quite well. For some reason US based devs are simply more in demand.

After this year, I've had more than enough of 'solidarity'.

No, it's called getting shafted. The EU has more or less the same wealth floating around as any other western country, but it's in total stagnation.

We can argue about why this is, but the end result is that asset prices are high, while there's no incentive to cycle money through the economy in a way that allows wealth building.

Not even the government is willing to spend, which is a problem because the government has set itself up to be the subsidizer of everything. The scale of the problem is easily appearant when you see Brussels celebrating a €10b climate package. Exactly what is €20 per citizen supposed to achieve?

The EU isn’t a country, it’s a free trade area with a relatively small (normally just roughly 1% GDP) fund to help the weaker regions inside it.

Financiers in London are paid similar to financiers in NYC, it's not about solidarity, it's about supply and demand. And forces of supply and demand are not working in developers' favour in European countries. I myself switched from being a quant dev to a trader within a large bank (and now a fund) and the work is a lot more interesting/rewarding and better paid.

Finland, Sweden, and Denmark have a much healthier startup scene than the UK does. You can also go further afield and explore places like Lisbon, which have a growing buzz.

In some ways they have a much healthier startup scene than SV does.

You won't earn $400k - guaranteed until the restructuring and breakup layoffs hit - but you will be happier and less stressed, and your kids will be too. And you won't be living in a city that has become a dystopian nightmare.

If you're all about the money then of course you won't get what's cool about the EU.

And that's fine. Because not only do companies have cultural fit, so do countries.

I don't think you can speak for everyone when you claim not to care about literally millions of dollars in lost opportunity by not living in a country that doesn't shaft you.

It's millions. The delta between the average US salary and the average EU salary is gigantic, and if invested in a conservative investment portfolio consisting of index funds means by choosing to live in the EU you're willingly giving up many millions of dollars by time you're in retirement.

When I'm retired, I don't want to be broke and penniless and I certainly wouldn't be thinking that the free healthcare I received was worth the amount I was scammed.

On what planet is healthcare worth many millions of dollars? It's not worth it. You're better off by any calculation in the US. Substantially so.

51k when you're doing the same stuff that someone in the US is making 175k for? You're being robbed in broad daylight.

To put it another way, consider that a senior level developer in Sweden makes substantially less than a fresh grad in the US.

All senior developers I know make significantly more than 51000.

Yeah, other people in other countries make more money, and it was a competition for who is richest when they die, Sweden would really suck. But I really enjoy my life here, and I don’t plan to wait until I retire to do that. (And I lived abroad for five years, including 2 years in the US, so I have something to compare with).

Throughout my career, people have told me I don’t earn enough, that I can get paid more.

Ok, but I’m still wealthier in my 30s than most people are when they retire — my biggest regret in life to date is not having a family, not the even bigger pile of money I could’ve earned if I’d gone to Silicon Valley or invested £10k into BTC in May 2010.

> When I'm retired, I don't want to be broke and penniless and I certainly wouldn't be thinking that the free healthcare I received was worth the amount I was scammed.

> On what planet is healthcare worth many millions of dollars? It's not worth it. You're better off by any calculation in the US. Substantially so.

You're missing pensions, which EU countries have, which mean in most cases you won't find yourself broke and penniless when you retire. And work hours, which are substantially less. And vacation time, which is literally multiple times more ( 5 weeks paid minimum in France for instance), and "unlimited sick time" ( it's sick there's even such a concept in the US). What good are your millions if you have to wait to retirement to actually use them, being too busy working 60 hour weeks? Or having to go into work sick? Or ffs, after the birth of a child?

As a developer in Stockholm in a not particularly exciting big company in a not particularly exciting position I making about $80000. I have daycare for my two kids within 200 meter from my home, and I pay less than $200 per month and kid for that. I have a safe bicycle commute that takes less than half an hour. I have the forest behind the house. In my area kids as young as 7 roam around without direct supervision on their bicycles. Im currently on paid (ok, it doesn’t cover 100% of my salary, but enough) parental leave and will be for another three months. After that I will probably use my legal right to work 80% while the kids are small. And of course free healthcare.

I know that this is far from what everyone wants, and wasn’t what I looked for 10 years ago, but for me, now, it is almost perfect. And I don’t think there’s many places in the world I can live like this.

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