Moving my US tech job to Australia | Hacker News Reader

Moving my US tech job to Australia

brendangregg.com

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Does moving to Australia stack up financially? All units in USD.

Netflix salary: $350,000 (minimum)

Tax as a single man in California with standard deduction: $133,000

Tax in Australia: $140,000

Price for a 3-bedroom house in Byron Bay: about $2m https://www.realestate.com.au/sold/property-house-nsw-byron+...

in SF: about $2m. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/23-Madrid-St-San-Francisc...

Taxes can be lowered significantly in the USA if you have a stay-at-home spouse and children. Australia does not allow tax combining. Taxes can be lowered in both countries with real estate deductions (although in Australia only for investment properties).

The major advantage for Australia is that there is no demographic underclass or widespread poverty/homelessness, which is a major problem in SF. But costs for Sydney and associated areas are hyper-expensive, about the same as SF.

Sydney latitude: 33.4° South. SF: 37.7° North

If he's keeping the SV salary then he's probably well ahead of the game.

(edit - I revise my previous statement that 2m is not typical, as I was looking at historical prices. It looks like Byron Bay has seen massive house price inflation in the last 8-10 years!)

> Australia does not allow tax combining.

Australia has family trusts, which can allow significant savings on tax. Or used to, I haven't lived there for most of a decade.

We do but a family trust isn’t relevant to an employee’s salary. E.g his Netflix salary wouldn’t be able to go into the trust until after paying income tax on it.

If he wanted to e.g invest in his wife’s name for tax reasons he could just transfer her the taxed income for her to invest with instead of using a trust.

Trusts provide the flexibility to distribute that future investment income to whichever member in that particular year to optimise tax.

Thanks for the correction.

You also forgot negative gearing. Investment losses can only be adjusted in the us on sale. In Australia real estate losses via negative can even offset income. I know folks who have a field day with this!

The primary barrier to distributing your salary through a trust is the personal services income rule.

https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/Personal-services-income/

The Byron Bay house you linked is a 7000sqft 7-bedroom mansion... doesn’t seem like quite a fair comparison, random little bungalows in the Bay Area cost the same.

From a quick dig around, it looks like there's not a lot under $1m in Byron Bay - which makes sense, it's a very pretty town in a beautiful location, it's small, well known and popular.

An hour up the coast at Tweed Heads (the southern end of Gold Coast), things are a lot more reasonable.

Many regional areas in Australia are going through a property boom as people rearrange their lives around remote working. Byron is right at the tip of that mountain. There are many more affordable towns both north and south of Byron.

Yes, moving to Byron for Australia is similar to Hawaii/Maui for California.

It’s closer to 4000sqft if we’re going by American standards. The internal spaces is 385m^2 which is about 4000sqft.

The lot is 7000sqft (not very large, IMO...)

Australia has national health so that tax difference is probably more than made up for by health insurance premiums.

I don’t know how Netflix does healthcare but many companies in SV give very good plans with no monthly premiums. I would expect the same of Netflix but maybe they don’t.

Both of us had good-to-great health insurance in the US thanks to our employers. But there's the rub: it's tied to employment, and if you lose your job for any reason, you either do without or pay (very expensive) COBRA. In Australia, everyone has Medicare (public health for all ages), and we currently also have supplemental insurance ("gap coverage") from my employer.

National-ish. You still pay for most visits privately if you want a better service. (As in, you want someone to spend more than 5min with you) But it's definitely much better than the US pricing.

It's true that house prices in Australia, especially Sydney, are so high right now they are on par with the Bay Area. Other financial details are harder to calculate: Your lifetime medical costs, for example. And also a lack of bonuses or pay raises. A number of times my US-citizen colleagues were offered money to stay in jobs when I, as a visa worker, was offered none. Companies believe that visa workers are unable to quit, and abuse it (regardless of who you are). (Disclaimer: not Netflix, they truly treat their visa workers well.)

Sydney has been famously expensive for a while I think... It's a lovely city though.

Personally I'm looking at the other side of Aus, where a family home seems to be achievable around the half million mark.

Byron Bay is a pretty specific place. Realistically the range for nice houses is in AUD: city centres - 2M+, suburbs - 1M+, regional 300k+. Tourist places like Byron can be anywhere in between or higher really.

I read Brendan's book on performance in order to prep for an SRE role. Awesome tips and it showed a whole new world!

Also the blog post he's referencing is from my (European) perspective very understandable [1]. I get their move, I'd probably have done the same in their position.

[1] https://www.beginningwithi.com/2020/12/01/why-move-to-austra...

With Melbourne having been in lock down last year for more than 3 months in a single stretch, everyone who physically could work from home were forced to... and now we're all used to it. As companies have slowly opened offices back up in the past few months, and some companies forcing employees back into the office, I think that's given a lot of managers perspective in term of work from home... in that, if you don't continue the option of work from home, you're going to lose staff.

My brother-in-law recently spoke to a recruiter who had two jobs advertised. Both jobs had the same job description, and the only difference was that one was work from the office while the other was work from home (with a $20k pay reduction). Over 60 people applied for the work from home role while a single applicant applied to the work from the office role. Let me repeat - people opted for a $20k drop in pay so they could work from home.

It's good that Silicon Valley companies are letting people repatriate whilst not losing staff... I've always thought that only focusing on the small pool of people in your local area for perspective employees was a hiring local maximum.

$20k/year gross = $250-ish/wk after tax. Given Sydney housing prices, you may still be better off taking the lower package and living somewhere that's not Sydney.

Furthermore, at least in the US, a long commute can chew up a decent portion of that (between gas/depreciation/parking/rail pass) even just looking at the economics.

I lived in the Gold Coast for a year while my job was in Sydney. I commuted by air once a week. Total commute time and housing expenses decreased.

> In the future I'd expect hybrid teams, where the remote workers visit the office on a regular cadence (e.g., once a quarter) for meetings.

I wish people wouldn't surrender so easily to the old centralized model. IMO, the software that runs the world should be developed all over the world, not merely by US west coast companies with remote satellites, but in a truly decentralized manner, like Linux itself (as Brendan mentioned in this post).

Edit: This is one reason why I'm happy that I left Microsoft to cofound an all-remote company; I'm back in Kansas, my cofounder (the CEO) is in Florida, and we haven't met in person in over a decade (when he was my boss).

How much of the active new feature work for linux happens in a decentralized manner? It seems like a lot of the time it's mostly a single company with a team that's centralized doing the design and coding, and then throwing it over the wall to be reviewed and accepted. That latter half is easy to decentralize, the former not as much.

Sure, any given feature may be developed by a single company in a central location. But in aggregate, IIUC, Linux kernel development is decentralized. It's not like a proprietary OS such as Windows, where feature development happens top-down (including the decisions about which features get developed in which office). For example, recall that the hypervisor built into the Linux kernel, KVM, was originally developed and contributed by a little company in Israel (before they got bought by Red Hat). They needed a hypervisor for their desktop virtualization product, so they developed it and contributed it. It wasn't part of any grand top-down strategy for the Linux OS. IMO, that's the key difference.

Ah boy sounds awesome for him.

I like his blogs and books. Always looking at performance analysis and getting down to the issues myself whenever I can

I also thought about what I'm looking for my home and having the ocean close feels something I would really like. Primarily due to it always being in motion and active.

I think that's something which would help me to calm down mentally (adhs ).

Good for him that he can go home. I haven't found a good way achieving this in Europe. I'm in Germany and thought about going to Italy or franche countryside. Next to fiber Starlink could help here as well.

Luckily my company will allow working remotely after corona and thanks to corona I know that I can do it as well.

Heading over to the West Coast later this year myself. I've lived there before and love the sunshine, the pace of life and the big open spaces (compared to here in the UK).

I won't earn as much as I would if I stayed a London(ish) Fintech(ish) contractor here, but the quality of life is so much better, IMHO.

How do salaries compare in Sydney vs the US if you're at a competitive company?

If you knew a talented and ambitious programmer early in their career in Australia would you recommend they stay or move abroad?

Quite good by local standards, but a far cry from Silicon Valley levels. Taxation is a killer as well, and the cost of housing in Sydney is not far off SV levels.

If you by "ambitious" you mean ladder-climbing/director/co-founder by 40, SV definitely has a lot more options. But if you just want interesting work, it's not too hard to find.

I was thinking more like by late 20s if they start young, but basically yes.

I personally didn't enter the industry until my 30s and in many ways I think I'm fortunate that my first job was at a startup in Beijing and the next 3 years were all in SF. Back when I was there, it was an amazing place to learn, albeit very expensive and without a commensurate quality of life outside of work.

"taxation is a killer"... and yet, some of it is actually spent keeping people alive.

I would recommend you mostly disregard the headline salary or taxes and look at cost of living and resulting disposable income. When you add tax + cost of medical care in both countries the US is higher. Cost of housing, even in Sydney, is high but lower than the Bay Area.

The lifestyle is quite different. I am planning to move but am a bit concerned that my (us citizen) partner will find even that adjustment difficult. I think it’s superior or I wouldn’t be longing to move after long term residence in Palo Alto.

One thing about disposable income: you’ll often see people around the Bay Area with expensive cars and toys but who live in a small rented apartment. They don’t make enough to buy, so after rent have a lot of disposable income. Over the long term that’s not financially as good as living somewhere else.

There's also public transport. Both Sydney and Melbourne have a decent train/tram/bus network that's usable for daily transport.

I'm not familiar with Bay area specifically, but I've seen US areas where the car is a requirement.

Seattle is the answer there to avoid the CA state tax, cheaper rent / cost of living. Check levels.fyi for entry level SDE1 jobs / salaries. $160-190K USD total comp. Rent (usually your biggest expense) for a studio / 1BR is about 1.5-2K/mo. Tax brackets are quite different (that entry level job might push you into the 32% marginal rate, while in AU, that would be the 45% marginal bracket).

Mid career you could be earning 3-6x your Aussie salary post tax (depending on the exchange rates, life choices etc.), particularly if you find yourself earning significantly more due to stock appreciation.

Ah, but the weather... yes, I know it doesn't rain as much as people think (I've been there at all times of year) but it is awfully dark for awfully many hours in the winter.

Yep - the weather is terrible. It rains all the time and the people are frosty too :D

*Sydney gets more rain per year than Seattle

Very true! But it's a lot warmer and the day/night seasonal change is not so extreme.

Sydney is currently deemed a bit lower, but not by huge amount. (So I'm not sharing something I don't know if I can, let me say that someone _else_ in a very similar situation got a 20% cut going to Sydney.) And I think that won't last in the long run, as companies embrace remote and there is competition, it'll be a race towards parity with the US.

Go to the US. Australia cannot compete on salary, even after cost of living differences. You can easily earn double in the US.

The E-3 visa makes it a lot easier than other countries, too.

I would give anything to move Down Under, it’s a magical place. Sadly they don’t need anymore network infrastructure sales people.

New Zealand appears to be the easier choice to get into and is also a lovely place to live. Plus if you get Kiwi citizenship after 5 years that can also open the door to Aus a bit easier further down the line.

(this is something I looked into before the Australian government decided to grant me a visa I wasn't expecting to get granted)

My family and I just did this. We fly out to NZ on Tuesday. Although it wasn’t easy (I doubt this kind of move ever is) if your specialty is lacking in NZ and you already are contracting for a NZ company and you have no criminal record, it’s very doable.

The question is - can you deal with the difference in salary? For my family it’s a no-brainer but I suspect others aren’t as keen on it.

For me - yes. The lifestyle more than makes up for it. Plus I’ve got a bit of a head start on things by building up a war chest here over the last few years.

But then I’m not looking to be an SV high flyer - I’m looking to work regularish hours, go fishing, level up my home-brew game and make a nice nest with my partner :)

Good luck with your move, that’s exciting with it being just a few days away!

Apart from the Covid era there is free exchange across the Tasman sea. My sister moved to NZ amd started working without any paperwork, and I believe that works the same way in reverse.

Can't lie. That Byron Bay scene looks pretty chill ;)

Surprised to find out that Netflix has a cricket team.

Why? I'd imagine any tech company or companies with large IT / software departments would have cricket team. At least I have found at most places I worked.

Why the tech/software link at all? Large (or not even that large really - size probably more an indicator of variety than existence at all) companies in general tend to have 'extra-curriculars' like that, cricket or otherwise, even if it happens entirely off-site and out of working hours, it's just an easy way to know people and organise such things.

The link I think is because tech/software people tend to have a lot of brown (brown as in South Asian) people, and a lot of grew up and love playing cricket.

Oh. Well I'm white British (also grew up with cricket) but wouldn't be surprised at companies from around several tens of employees and up having at least one sports team of some kind; the specific sport you want being more likely the larger company.

Most common here are probably football, netball, and cricket, I reckon. So if it was about what sort of company at which to find cricket specifically, then I misunderstood, tech link makes more sense!

In the SF Bay area there are a number of cricket leagues. We played in the GPL (Google Premiership League) but actually spent more time practicing. There's also cricbay, which has over 110 teams in the bay area. 110. Visit baseball diamonds on a Saturday morning and there's a good chance you'll find a cricket game. (At least, that was before the pandemic.) The cricket and the players is something I'll actually miss about moving out of the bay area!

> Additional reasons for me included visa uncertainty

> I moved to the US in 2006

So that very likely means Brendan continued to be on visa by choice? Given AU has dual citizenship that's certainly an interesting choice to not pursue US permanent residency or citizenship, former of which would have addressed the visa issue and latter the voting rights. (However, this would have still left open the dual taxation issue which can be a substantial problem for high earners.)

Anyway it's 2021 and remote work has come farther along and one should work wherever they like. The pandemic helped fix the trust issue and remote work is more or less going to be a norm going forward.

Permanent residency does not address voting rights in the slightest. Permanent residents may not vote in federal elections or most state elections, and despite a proposal to allow voting in the New York City mayoral election made at the start of 2020, it does not appear to be the case even for that.

Remote work is indeed the new norm though.

I am well aware that PR doesn't provide voting rights - I just worded that sentence wrong - I meant to say former (PR) addresses VISA issues and Citizenship which basically requires 5 years residency on PR - addresses the voting part. Reworded.

If you become a US citizen you have to pay US tax for the rest of your life regardless of where you live.

If you don't feel committed to the US, then why would you put up with such a thing?

What happens if you move and simply ignore US taxes?

Only works if the country doesn’t have a tax agreement already. Here in Singapore the forms have a box to state if you’re from the US. You can’t dodge it here. And apparently people here have given up us citizenship in favour of Singapore citizenship and tax was one of the reasons.

Oh yes I forgot that case as well.

Depends. If you have assets in US the Automated Collection System may be able to take part of what is due. If you want to go back to US depending on the amont you owe, it can be taken from property sells and can go up to US taking your passport (the US one only obviously), thats a recent rule and applies only if you owe more than $50k.

Only on earnings above 80k and foreign taxes are deductible. You can also funnel income through puerto rico and legally avoid US taxes.

In 1999 I was earning $135k from a US-based job while I lived in Italy. Thanks to the tax treaty, I did not pay US income tax on the first $85k of that, but I paid Italy for it. I paid BOTH COUNTRIES on the remainder. Lost over 55% of my income to taxes that year. I was not thrilled that a lot of it was going to the Berlusconi government.

I'm told (by tax specialists) that nowadays the situation is that you pay the taxes in whichever country has the higher taxation rate, but nothing in the other country. That will be fine - I'm ok with paying higher taxes when I'm getting better services, like a good public health system that works for everyone.

You have to report taxes. Whether you pay taxes depends on whether there's a tax treaty with your residence to avoid double taxation. Australia and the USA have such a treaty.

A note: reporting applies to tax residents, not just citizens. Brendan will be reporting to the US for some years to come, simply by virtue of his long time spent in the US.

(Of course, I am not a tax lawyer, etc)

> If you don't feel committed to the US, then why would you put up with such a thing?

For the protections of citizenship and the right to vote. If you have made a life in the US that's worth having.

Sure. And if you live in the US, you'll have to pay US taxes anyway. The parent's point is that, if you think you'll permanently move out of the US in a few years anyway, you should probably think hard about whether you really want US citizenship.

Many countries have higher tax rates than the US. Australia is one of them

> that's certainly an interesting choice to not pursue US permanent residency or citizenship,

Why this presumption? I have a gc and have for many years with no interest in changing passports. I have friends who have lived in the US for decades on investor visas.

The US has been good for me but I’ve definitely been good for it so it’s a fair exchange. It’s not the kind of place that encourages me to “join” though.

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