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Comment by mclightning | Hacker News Reader

Hej! I am preparing to move abroad from Malmö, due to lack of social life, and language barrier I experienced here (similarly as you describe with English not being local language)

I am trying to decide between London or California. London seems so much easier to move to. I am on the verge of giving up trying with California.

I don't have any job opportunities at hand at either right now. I am an IT Consultant, and as you know, most contract brokers for Nordics are actually UK based and offered to find me contract immediately.

UK offers some visa pathways for IT Consultants, whereas with US; I literally don't know any direct/clear pathway for it.

Compensation-wise; as IT Consultant in EU, I already make as much as in US and can do same in UK. So that's not a factor for me.

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While London and Londoners are very friendly, I would recommend considering secondary cities in the UK as a destination, for example Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh or Cambridge. The pay is usually comparable to all but the highest London rates and the cost of living is lower. They also tend to have very active music and art scenes and are slightly less tainted by the sheer amount of money sloshing around London. If there's an internationally known university and a reasonably sized city centre you won't go far wrong. A word of warning, some ancient and well renowned universities are situated near otherwise quiet cities, which have a charm of their own, but some research will be required.

Indeed. I plan to start with London for now, but I am definitely seeing myself moving to a slightly calmer city a bit later. I hope to own a house with a garden later in life, and London housing market is pretty expensive from what I heard.

Hej! I was a contractor in the UK before I moved to Stockholm (also severe lack of social life which is why I need to get out asap) and I'm curious, was your comp the same in the EU as an IT consultant as US employment with stock? Because the highest daily rates I was able to find in the UK were usually somewhere around 650-900 GBP per day which would still put you below US comp with RSU.

I can't speak from experience for US, but from what I read/heard online; SW. Engs. salaries there range from 90K to 250K. I just turned down an offer of a contract annually adding up to 220K$ roughly (total into my company before MOMS/VAT), because people are extremely antisocial here, and I ran out emotional patience/capacity. I just really can't anymore and need out asap. After 8 years here, I barely have a social circle to throw a birthday party. I moved here as a Tech Evangelist, very sociable person and my social skills has and is diminishing away.

650-900gbp per day sounds similar to southern Sweden. Hourly rates here go between 750 to 1300 sek.

just to check if we are doing the math same way;

650gbp x (365 per year - 30 vacation days) = 217750 gbp

Isn't that already very high? in comparison to some US salary?

You’re including weekends in your calculation :) I believe OP is talking about contract/freelance work where you only get paid for the days you work.

For a fair comparison vs a full time job in the U.K. when I compared the two recently, I was using 226 working days per year (261 week days - 8 bank holidays - 27 paid holiday days). Of course if you don’t want to take so much holiday or want to and can work weekends then you’ll earn more!

650 x 226 is £144,460 for the record, still nothing to complain about!

Ah sorry, you're right. I wrongly added the weekends there. But you get the idea. It is still not much lower than US salaries. Note that also we are using the lowest hourly rate here with 650gbp.

Working as a consult comes with its own risks (not much worker rights, very little or no notice period when terminated etc). But those risks are not too bad when you consider how little worker rights one has in US.

10th percentile compensation for senior engineers in the US looks something like 350-400k/year. (At a rough guess, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple employ 6-7% of the software engineers in the country, and there are enough other firms paying similar amounts of money that 10th percentile sounds about right.) This is with pretty great benefits, too.

I'm pretty happy with the trade-off w.r.t. freedom of association where a business can fire me for ~any reason at any moment, and likewise I can go and get a new job paying mind-bogglingly huge amounts of money with minimal friction. (No amount of "worker rights" will save you if the company employing you goes under, like so many did in the dot com era.)

That is the top performer salary, if any. When I check glassdoor for software engineer salaries at Amazon; average base salary is around 128K$ and top is 225K$ among all disclosed on glassdoor.

That being said, I don't know if I would plan my life entirely around being in the absolute top %10 of engineers. Avg. seems like a better figure to compare when speaking of whole markets/countries.

I plan to be at top %40 of engineers in a given field as a specialist and be a generalist overall. Seems like EU is a better fit for me then.

Check levels.fyi, not Glassdoor. Glassdoor systematically underreports compensation for a wide variety of reasons. (And is in general pretty inaccurate; Amazon is publicly known to have a base salary cap of 185k in high cost-of-living locations, and 160k elsewhere, with the rest of the compensation coming from bonus/stock.)

40th percentile compensation in the US is probably still much higher than in the EU, but you do you.

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