Ask HN: Relocating from London to Silicon Valley for a higher salary at 35?

What type of visa you get shouldn’t affect your salary. Big advantage of O1 over H1B is that you can apply outside the yearly H1B lottery schedule. Pre pandemic the lottery was about a 1 in 4 chance to get a place. Qualifying for an O1 can be difficult though.

Whichever initial visa route you take make sure your employer starts your green card application as soon as they can.

SF doesn’t feel like a big city in the way NY or London does (LA is the major city in California.) There is substantially less cultural life here. If you work in Silicon Valley (best jobs are there) you’ll be working in an office park 30-50 miles from downtown SF.

The hardest thing I’ve found is the 8 hour time zone difference makes staying in touch with friends and family harder. Can’t just call someone in the evening.

Even if you live and work in SF you’ll probably want to get a car so you can easily get out and see California. There is outstandingly beautiful nature around here.

Do you want to live in Silicon Valley? Because if not this seems like a really inefficient way to get pay rise.

Why not buy property and make additional income from being a landlord or something? You could even try to start a side project if you're willing to take the risk?

I live in the UK and I thought about moving to the states a few years back, but being close to family and friends at least for me is worth more than the marginal pay increase.

You could also improve your quality of life moving out of London. Contracting rates are quite flat across the UK. I own a lovely house in the South West, but if I were living in London I'd probably only be able to afford a small flat. But it's not just housing everything is cheaper here. In London you can earn very good money but still feel relatively poor which might be part of the problem here.

Sorry, I know I'm not really answering your question. Just some things to think about. =)

Are they flat? I've always been under the impression that London rates are 25-50% more.

Like at the moment the jobs I see advertised outside London are £350 a day, inside £450-550 (outside IR35, seems people are adding 20% for inside IR35 contracts).

Take a look at Seattle too. Lots of tech jobs, reasonably high pay that is slightly lower then the Bay Area but cost of living is lower and we don't have the state taxes of California. I've found it to be the best tradeoff. Only issue is the weather, but if you're coming from London, it's basically the same

Interview with a bunch of companies and see what kind of offers you get. Now is a good time because all the interview processes are remote, so you're not limited to traveling to the Bay Area for interviews and can do as many of them as your schedule & stamina allows. Many companies are also going remote, so you may also be able to stay in London and work for a Silicon Valley company (my Coinbase interviewer lived in London, for example). The company would probably sponsor your visa if you do move.

My gut is that if you're good and interview well, you could probably pull in $300-400K including stock compensation (maybe $150-160K salary), which would easily make it worth your while. The final word is always the offer letter, though, so get as many offer letters as you can and play them off each other.

Isn't visa the main issue here? H1-B is a lottery with unfavorable odds, O-1 requires being exceptional (I guess you can try gaming that with a bunch of bullshit conference talks and hoping the immigration officers do not catch wind that, in tech, most conferences are low-status careerist bs fest).

Yes but once you get to the multi-billion-$, major consumer name companies, they have whole departments dedicated to figuring out what visa is most likely to get the applicant into the U.S. and what they need to present to the government to make it happen. I hired an intern from Canada once and my understanding was that behind the scenes the process was complex, but all they needed from me was a description of the work and a few signatures. It definitely is more of a hassle for the employer, it introduces additional risk and uncertainty for the employee, but they have a lot of levers they can pull to get the right employee into the right role. As an employee your best bet is to ace the interview so you can convince them that you're the best employee, then let them worry about how to get you into the country.

OP also has an advantage being from the UK - I've heard that the odds are much more favorable for European tech workers, because quotas are higher and immigrant populations are lower for European countries than say India.

Thanks for the comment. Any tips on popular job sites in the Bay Area?

indeed by far seems like the best job scraper, 2nd be Dice? But I can tell without question. If you're looking for an interview. You need to find someone in the inside who can refer. A typical job could literally have hundreds if not thousands of resumes of course all scanned by machines. The only ones that gets any considering are always the inside referral. I've hired almost 90% from inside referrals, the outside even pre-screened takes days weeks even months to work through. For the hiring mgr, that's too much pain. Also the pressure from inside to hire the "referred" candidate is also another factor. So yeah, if you're trying to come in cold, your chances are slim to none. One way in if no directly referral is through LinkedIn's network of "connections.'

PS> However, now a days, if you're a dev and can show, exhibit, describe your work. In particular one you created, lead, and managed is to have articles/GitHub to showcase them. Depending on the problem and the solution you're showcasing. That could get you the interview if not the job outright since machines can't scan and quantify that so will need to be flagged for human review.

Go for the companies that you've heard of - basically any company with a hot product and global reach. FANGs, Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Stripe, Roblox, Coinbase, DoorDash, DropBox, SnapChat, Tesla, Zoom, etc. Most of them have job pages on their website. Even better if you can get a referral, though that's harder if you're not local for networking. HN also has a monthly "who's hiring" thread that has some good leads.

Is for example Google in MV open to hiring people from Europe? Won't they just tell me to go apply at one of the numerous European Google offices?

You indicate your preference for office when you apply - if you go through their Jobs site it's part of the position, or you can tell the recruiter that you'd prefer Mountain View positions. I was living in Boston (a little bit easier than UK since it's still in the US, but still cross-country) when I first applied - I said that I was open to roles in either Boston or Mountain View, but would prefer Mountain View since I was looking to relocate. Oftentimes it makes it easier for the company, since there are more roles available at headquarters. Visa issues are usually easier to resolve than team-fit issues.

If you are already in London, I would stay put. Major FANG companies like FB are already making major inroads to build out offices in the UK. And they will likely disrupt the UK/EU salaries quite a bit in the coming years.

Look for contacts in those companies and try and land a gig there. Far easier than relocating and dealing with Visa issues in the US.

All the big tech companies in the area pay significantly less in London from knowing engineers there and talking to recruiters in the past. I doubt they are going to start changing that any time soon when they can get good engineers without doing that. I've kept an eye on this when looking for jobs before because I think it would be fun to live in London for a few years, but it's not worth the tradeoff when you can make much more and save much more on the west coast in the US. COL in London is high, and pay is low comparatively (and this is coming from someone in Seattle which traditionally has slightly lower pay then Bay Area)

Those companies already exist in London and they give a haircut of 30% over US salary practically as a matter of policy. Why would they pay more than they need to in the abysmal UK market?

I'm trying to understand your 30%. Are you saying they give 70% of US salary or 30%?

Sorry, I meant 30% haircut, so yeah, 70% of total US salary. Granted that's totally rough but you can confirm it on glassdoor. People will give you CoL arguments but they're BS -- London is just as expensive as NYC, if not more. A big part of the problem is that HMRC costs increase so rapidly above £120k. It seems like the UK government is hampering the willingness of US companies to raise salaries past that level. It's typical UK government behavior, honestly.

This is interesting but I think it's just a matter of time before the dam breaks and all the tech companies with a UK presence start increasing salaries to get more competitive. The same thing happened in NYC around 2015-2020. At some point money talks and the bullshit starts to walk.

I know someone who is moving from NYC to the UK to run an engineering team at a FANG company. He'll want to hire the best engineers and be willing to pay for them. And I know he wouldn't have taken that job if it didn't come with a big pay increase.

Have you considered moving to a EU country, especially from eastern EU, to pay lower taxes? For example, where I live, I only pay around 230 EUR per month for an income of 7k EUR/month (of which half of it is for pension and 50 eur for medical insurance).

In your case I think you'll be paying around 8% because you have a higher income and you'll need to start an actual company.

How easy is it to get a job in eastern European countries? And how does one go about finding jobs if you are outside EU? I have tried a couple of job sites, but haven't received any leads. Appreciate any pointers.

Where do you live? How is that possible?

Romania. I'm registered as a "persoana fizica autorizata" (PFA), which has 2 types of taxation systems: - real (which means you're taxed ~40% based on how much you earn). - norma de venit, where you'll need to pay taxes for a fixed amount of money, even if you make less. This system is only for persons making below 100k eur/year, after that you'll be moved to the "real" taxation.

In op case, he exceeds the 100k limit and he'll need to register a company instead where there's a 3% revenue tax plus a 5% income tax.

This site [1] says self-employed (PFA) has an income tax of 16% and national insurance of 10.5% or 26.3%, and another 5.5% (I didn't understand that part very well).

Micro-LLCs [2] have a 3% (no employees) or 1% (1 to 3 employees) corporation tax and 16% tax on dividends.

1 - http://www.fnsadscagrostar.ro/centre-de-formare/item/1891-ce...

2 - https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/romania/corporate/taxes-on-corp...

Yeah, that's the real system, there's also "norma de venit" which is quite different - you'll pay for a fix amount per year.

Also, the dividend tax was lowered to 5%.

In Poland software engineers are able to pay 5% linear income tax if they can proove they do R&D and sell copyrights to their code. The rules seem to be quite loose in this regard and thus lots of developers qualify for the discount.

£160k? Holy crap. Any tips on how you got to that level? Sounds really good even for contracting - how many weeks a year do you work?

[WARNING: unfiltered and raw] I'm in the valley. Have been here for 20+ yrs. Worked for FAANG+M and startups. I was a hiring mgr eventually turning into prgm mgr due to ceilings I met described below. Here's my 2cents raw.

The valley generally holds ppl with VISA hostage and they prefer cheaper caught in visa trap workers. Unless you bring extraordinary knowledge and skillset, in particular Sr dev/Scientist/PhD in AI/ML/CV. Coming here would be a disappointment.

You are in the "2nd" silicon valley now making good money. I would stay there and if so inclined. Best you find a position there of an American Silicon Valley based Co you could either move laterally or travel/visit. I think that's the far better way to see what's up here before leaping into the dark waters. Silicon isn't what it used to be.

The visa trapped people are generally chinese/indian. Low salary, stuck for years competing in cutthroat environment. Not to sound too racist, if you're 6' white male with ppl mgmt, then silicon valley maybe your calling. An almost guaranteed meal ticket to success if you can make the right connections. PS> I'm not 6' white male. Places you would be good for if you're 6' white male: FAANG+M and startups.

Much disillusionment here.

Your "problem" isn't so much making more. It's simply getting more and that is a typical problem one faces anywhere. Best you boost your skillset, move to another Co for more pay. That's the only way you make more regardless of location.

TL'DR: Again, if you're trying to make more money, best you boost your skillset and move to different company. Countless stories of people jumping co and in few years literally make double coming back to the same Co. One can easily boost 10-20% then move BACK to for another 10-16%. It's incredulous how you can make the earth move while at the company, but companies are unwilling to move your salary instep. However, you can move out increase your skillset a tad, then move back only get 20% more. Why? Because NO company will give you a 20% raise. NO company. However, you coming in from outside with bit more experience in new stuff. Some reason they will pay whatever you want.

PS> Didn't address your age. 35 is pushing it. here in the valley, at 35, your boss may be at least 5yrs if not more younger.

PPS> You must be single, regardless of age. Wife....ok, kids...you won't get hired

Do I sound bitter? Biased? Full of Resentment? yup :) If you're a minority w no EQ but plenty of IQ, there is a glass ceiling made of gorilla glass v99

WoW