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Comment by bluetomcat | Hacker News Reader

Just leave your SF/VC bubble, move to a medium-sized European city and such jobs will be plentiful. Most likely you'll be maintaining internal business applications on uncool and legacy technology stacks. The value of these applications is mostly for the particular business and your experience wouldn't transfer easily to a new job. The upside is that job security is far greater there. Also, you'll have less opportunities to blog about what you are doing, or to write insightful HN comments because most of what you do is totally uninteresting for the world.

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And between income tax, payroll tax, sales tax, you'll be taking a substantial cut in income - for housing which is more expensive, colder weather, and less sunlight.

I'm sorry, but exactly which "medium-sized European city" has more expensive housing than SF?

I'll be moving back to Europe this year, and I find your comment quite funny, given that I am moving to a city with significantly cheaper housing and better weather than where I live now (NYC).

I see you have no health issues, no teeth, and no family to speak of, and very much enjoy car-first public infrastructure. You also have no idea that cultures (people, food, entertainment, experiences) in different countries can be different.

QoL is not only measured in "dollars of income".

The weather and sunlight are heavily dependent on the city - Stockholm and Valencia may be on the same continent but are vastly different in those aspects.

Housing isn't more expensive baring maybe the city centers of huge cities like Paris and London. But housing is much more evenly spread and better connected with transit, so you don't jump from uber expensive dense city core to very far away low density suburbs. Savings from healthcare and transportation, plus pensions, offset the taxes, mostly.

Just find medium sized businesses in any major city - many will still be using these stacks. Just avoid the ones that do not invest or see IT as a cost center (there are many of those). Any decently profitable medium sized business that is willing to invest in reliable IT AND knows that they should be involving in IT in many of their normal day to day processes in order to drive further innovation / optimization is probably a decent place to work.

Come to Southeast Asia if you care about all that. Well, pay is a lot lower, but there's less taxes, more sunlight, lots of old tech, and good cheap healthcare. Also plenty of beaches, islands, and water parks.

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