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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

If you don't like MCOL will the company increase your pay when you return to HCOL?

If yes, this is a no-brainer.

Be warned, visits to cool places don't show the same things as living there, and some of what you're feeling is classic FOMO and grass-is-greener. That said, I left London for a Brisbane lifestyle and never regretted it, and I've seen many many cities in my long working life and I know what living in a cool HCOL city (London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Melbourne) long-term is like because I have.

I just prefer more average city life.

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I’m in a similar situation except I’m still in a HOCL city (Sydney) and it’s really starting to grind on me. What do you like about Brisbane?

Aside from its terrible public transport model, it's a reasonably rational, but not grid-based life. (Melbourne's Hoddle grid is great!) House prices are of course insane, but less so than the Southern states.

It has good food, a mixture of tin-and-timber, modern, suburban, apartment living, it has great weather. It doesn't have Coogee or Bondi or Manly and it has a lot of urban sprawl, but within 2h drive are rainforest, beaches, hills.

It has good schools and universities for that stage of life, the inner city is much less frenetic than Sydney's equivalent. We don't have paddy's markets but we do have good food markets, if smaller. Less of a night-life scene but not none.

How do you like the tech scene in there?

I've tried to move to Brisbane around 5 years ago and even had an episode working remotely for a company located in there which wanted to sponsor me, but ultimately the compensation vs COL ratio seemed very bad, even if you compare it to Europe, so I didn't pull the trigger.

At that time there were really only a few interesting jobs in web development (I specialize in Ruby on Rails). Is it better now?

Amazon do stuff here. I think Amazon 'fresh' was coded in Brissie. There's quite a lot of software and network engineering, but nothing like Sydney or Melbourne. CSIRO/Data61 are in town, there's film and animation industries, Web mgt and hosting.

I don't know much about the ruby scene here, sorry.

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