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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Working in Canadian journalism, I’d often hear other editors reference the mythical former colleagues who had moved to New York—America, in this context, is always New York.

Lots of Americans dream of either LA or New York, depending on their industry. I imagine in Europe, it's probably Paris and London that draws both French/British and foreigners.

Frank Sinatra had a song called New York, New York and one of the lines is "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere."

It's sort of inevitable that the largest city in the region draws talent and ambition and this gravity pool does not respect international borders. Though I wish we did a better job of fostering diversity of views from other places even within the US.

It's something I've lamented before: Even Americans get kind of brainwashed that their local culture is inferior and everything is better in New York (and California) because that's where so much of our popular media originates and is set.

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>Even Americans get kind of brainwashed that their local culture is inferior

In small town USA, the local culture usually is inferior. The local culture tends to be very monoculture. It's the larger cities where the culture tends to be more diverse. Getting out of small town into the nearest larger town opened me up to a hell of a lot more than the people that never left. However, even in that larger town, it's still limited. Yes, I eventually went to the west coast to have even more multi-cultural experience. Later, I even got to finally start travelling internationally to expand that multi-cultural experience further.

Maybe it's a broad brush to paint with, but my local culture 100% was inferior, but I imagine it's not unique

Small town culture is a thing in Europe as well! I don't know if it's inferior but it's certainly different from the culture in a bigger city.

Eh, I've lived in small towns and major cities. One isn't categorically better than the other, they're just different. Your values align better with city life, but that doesn't make other cultures inferior (nor are you superior to the people who prefer them). I certainly appreciate the diversity of larger cities and small towns certainly aren't for me, but I can also appreciate having a functional municipal government, low crime rates, low poverty rates, dramatically less antisocial behavior, strong values / decency / civility, a simpler way of life, etc.

All of those things might be true, but I think what they are meaning by ‘culturally inferior’ is that there is less variety in people, food, and activities. This is simply an inescapable fact of having fewer people. You won’t be able to find as wide a variety of food, or entertainment, or art in a place with fewer people. There simply aren’t enough people to sustain the same level of variety.

I agree that there's less diversity, but conflating diversity with cultural superiority is foolish at best.

I agree that the word ‘superiority’ is loaded and probably not the appropriate term to use when talking about a culture. However, many people use the word ‘culture’ to mean countable things; if someone says a place ‘has a lot of culture’, often times they mean ‘there are many things to do’. In other words, a lot of options when you are choosing what you want to do for your day off, or your evening out.

Just imagine you are planning a night out with friends. As someone who grew up in a small town, our options were very limited. You could go to the movies, the bowling alley, or go to someone’s house. If you wanted dinner, there were only a few restaurants serving a small variety of cuisines. It would be impossible to do a different thing every night for more than a week or so.

In a big city, you could do something different every night and not run out of different things to do for years. You could eat a different restaurant every night, eating a completely different cuisine each time.

If you are simply counting things to do, a city is ‘superior’.

(not the OP, but somebody who's lived in both big cities and small towns and loved them both for different reasons)

I get what you're saying and agree to some degree. But at the same time, i think it's actually the last line ("if you're simply counting things to do") that I would personally quibble over as the sacred metric of what's better than the other.

Maybe some people don't really care about having ten gazillion different restaurants and would prefer at least three solid parks/hiking trails you can't get around some big cities? Maybe some folks would be more than happy to trade going to the theatres with having a home with 5+ acres to raise a chicken farm or other critters on, or if not that then at least the privacy and the minimal light pollution.

Some trades that people are willing to make kinda aren't so obvious.

I agree, which is why I mentioned the problem with the word ‘superior’, since there is no objective measure of what is a better culture. I was just trying to say their are objective differences.

Therea are good things about small towns, some of which you named, but some is idyllic fantasy:

> / decency / civility

That hasn't been my experience in small towns recently, unless you happen to fit in well with the people there. There's a highly aggressive paranoia and acting out.

> functional municipal government

They are almost powerless, IME. How small a town are you talking about?

Right, but the fun part is an American from a big city like New York will go visit some quaint rural town in a foreign country and admire the culture. Despite the locals feeling it's inferior and the big city 200 km away has superior culture.

Just goes to show it's all subjective.

European towns and villages often have many centuries, possibly millennia, of history. That at the very least adds depth.

Few American cities were founded > 200 years ago. None were founded more than 1565 (United States), and the oldest dates from 1502, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

That said, what a New Yorker visiting small-town Europe is probably referencing is the contrast between NYC and Small European Town. The specific town will likely be largely interchangeable with numerous others of similar description.

By contrast, a small town in the US or Canada largely resembles some of the less-distinguished suburbs of NYC itself: same language, same government, same mass media, same history, same chain stores and franchises. Far fewer people, however, and a much smaller economic and cultural ambit.

Even for small towns in which there is some distinctive culture ... it tends to be a single motif which dominates the entire town, rather than the melting pot of a major metropolis. Marfa, TX; Silver City, NM; Santa Fe, NM; Asheland, OR; and Napa, CA all have distinctive cultures, but it tends to be all-of-a-type.

Exceptions tend to be smaller college towns, for obvious reasons, but even here, the odds for highly-diverse communities tend to be lower than in larger cosmopolitan cities. And you can climb far up the major metro region and still find fairly stultified culture --- Chicago, IL, wears its "second city" moniker as a badge, but you'll still find there's some real edginess there about it if you press a bit or scratch beneath the surface. (The fact that it's third by size, and that Los Angeles also evinces a somewhat similar attitude toward New York doesn't help.)

Your entire premise seems to hinge on history being equivalent to culture.

I mean, NYC has a ton of culture but it's a young city.

I disagree with you premise.

"That at the very least adds depth" would suggest otherwise.

And if it's not what I managed to communicate effectively, I can assure you it is not at all my intended meaning.

Which would then falisify your own premise.

I mean history might add to culture, maybe.

But I’d argue NYC has more culture than say Edinburgh, Scotland despite the later having a far more extensive history.

Again, not inconsistent with my viewpoint.

Contrast though US cities of roughly comparable population (506,000 for Edinburgh), say, Sacramento, CA; Kansas City, MO; Mesa, AZ; or Atlanta, GA. Two of those are also state capitals, roughly matching Edinburgh's political status.

Remmeber that size was another key factor. Again, not sole, but key.

Global cities ratings gives additional ratings and bases for same:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city

GWAC ranks Edinburgh above all of the US cities, save Atlanta, which is just above it. Mesa and Sacramento are not ranked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization_and_World_Cities...

>” Even Americans get kind of brainwashed that their local culture is inferior and everything is better in New York (and California) because that's where so much of our popular media originates and is set.”

For additional evidence, the setting of most of “Breaking Bad” (now continuing as “Better Call Saul”) in Albuquerque, New Mexico led to meaningful economic benefits for people living there, such as increased tourism (from https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-xpm-2013-a...).

That’s surprising, watching those shows did not make me interested in going even a little bit

Having been to and through those regions I agree, I would not want to vacation or visit there without good reason. However, the show(s) made it seem like a fairly quiet and comfortable region (barring the cartels and drug addictions). Other than certain desert scenes, they really didn't do the environment justice; I rarely felt like long-sleeved Oxford shirt-wearing Walter or suit-wearing Jimmy/Saul were sweating constantly, which contradicted my own experiences, and I've been there in all months of the year. It does get chilly, as any desert/scrub land region does, but it felt a little off. I have the same issue with all the Dune adaptations, they just never really get across the temperature and/or humidity of the place unless it's relevant to a plot point.

>I imagine in Europe, it's probably Paris and London that draws both French/British and foreigners.

Lol no. Most people go in Paris because it's where they can found a job opportunity or for studies but wouldn't have otherwise, and a whole part of the country (which I belong too) view it has a place to actively avoid for living. And I can't think of anyone that's hated more outside of Paris than Parisians.

Ha. You’re proving OP’s point without realizing it. Replace “Paris” with “New York City” and your statements are equally true.

Some people would say this exact sentence about New York.

For software engineers in Europe is Dublin, Berlin and London. I'm one of the few that made it all the way to California. I've been always the guy trying to push fellow software engineers to go to the USA. Even though I lasted in the Silicon Valley only a year before quitting my full-time job and becoming a digital nomad and boostrapping my own SaaS company https://www.waiterio.com

Thank you. For software, it's San Francisco, not Los Angeles, that is Mecca in the US.

Los Angeles has its own prominent startup scene as well if you’re looking for that kind of lifestyle.

If you have any tips to get to the US as a European, I’d be happy to hear them.

If needed, my email is in my profile.

Shortest path is working for one of the FAANG companies, and requesting internal transfer to US.

This basically skips the daunting process that's H1B lottery.

A path I have seen many people take, and one I'm going to take soon, is to work at a US tech company (not necessarily FAANG, lots of largish companies do this) and transfer internally from Europe to the US. There is no lottery for L1B visas, so it's usually hassle free compared to that H1B mess.

L1B visas can also convert to green cards at some point, but I have no idea how easy that is (probably not easy at all).

> L1B visas can also convert to green cards at some point, but I have no idea how easy that is (probably not easy at all).

False. L1B is not related to Green Card in any way. You can get the employer to petiton you for a green card while working on L1B.

L1 is related to green card in the sense that with some statuses, you can never get a green card, but with L1 you can.

That’s called dual intent.

I internally transferred (with my family) from the UK to California in late 2016 and secured a green card in early 2020.

Marrying an American is probably the quickest and easiest way. You're not allowed to work on a K1 Visa, but once you're married your spouse can apply for a green card for you and right now there isn't much wait for green cards for America spouses - friend of mine's wife got hers in about five months after they got married.

This is true, but you need to really make sure your intent is to really marry, and not marry for greencard purposes which is fraud.

Certainly, yes! I am sorry if I didn't make that clear. Not only should you actually be in love/want to marry to avoid fraud but also for your own well-being.

The United States has an adult population of 258.3 million, so it's likely you'd find someone to fall in love with if you're really looking.

I have some experience here, I have a double digit amount of family members who came to the US to marry into my family, including my brother-in-law. With one exception they are all very happy marriages, the longest lasting 3 decades. There were some who were definitely were looking to marry Americans to immigrate, but the relationship is still real.

Americans are a great bunch. Contrary to popular (outsider) view, I think american family bond is very strong.

I’ll humor this idea.

What city is the best to find someone who is/has:

Open to new experiences and concepts (museums, art, dancing, music) <— literally the “openness to experience” on the big 5

High cognitive ability

Into meditation, yoga and exercise?

Somewhat into gaming and anime? (Optional)

Somewhat of a programmer or (game) designer/related (optional)

I'm going to assume you're M looking for F?

Generally, any big East Coast city. NYC, Atlanta, Washington DC, Chicago, and Boston would be top of mind.

Right assumption, thanks :)

Make friends with some Americans online, like in an online game or roleplaying forum or whatever. Visit the USA on a vacation and have them introduce you to their sisters/friends/whoever

It's really hard to get that marriage green card though, you're looking at many months of paperwork on top of building a successful relationship and committing your life to someone. I think it'd be a lot easier to get a job at a big company in the US and come over on an H1B, or build a SaaS business wherever you live now

My dream was to go to California too when I started studying computer science. Then I learned about employment laws, health care and social security in the US. As a person that had close experience how important these things are when things go wrong even though you might've been a millionaire, I feel pretty confident with my choice to stay in Europe.

To anyone that thinks these things don't matter if you earn enough money and safe a fair amount, I wish that they and especially their children never get into a situation that shows them how naive that thought was.

That doesn't compute.

If you work for, say, a FAANG company, you have pretty solid healthcare. Social security is surely limited, but there's good benefits for disability and so on.

The amount of money you can make in the US as an experienced engineer is probably 5 fold if not more. Senior engineers are easily pulling 7 figures here, which means even taking into account your cost-of-living, you'll end up fairly ahead.

> If you work for, say, a FAANG company, you have pretty solid healthcare.

While you're employed. For how many days of sickness does your contract say do they have to keep you employed? Isn't it even employment at will?

I don't wanna enter this discussion further. I'm just gonna finish with that I experienced first hand someone making what's today nearly a million a year (in Germany no less!) and ending up on social security within a few years due to sickness and bad investment. And that's with universal health care. A good job, high earnings and decent savings give you leeway, but they will not protect you from tragedy and even more important they will not protect your kids from tragedy that have no fault in whatever happens.

Not extending the discussion (I’m not the parent commenter), but I think your argument highlights the cultural differences that exist in an interesting way. In the US, independence, self-reliance and optimism are a much bigger part of the common culture. You are considering only worst case scenarios and assuming that the state is the only thing you can rely on. Consider how your view would be different with a more optimistic view of your own luck/ability to recover, and a more pessimistic view of government.

Could you go leave us for Germany and still get healthcare there? I don't know, just asking.

I am not usually planning for worst case and i tend to be optimist, i have a working spouse and i make decent money, and my plan is to be buried here in the US, but if shit hits the fan, and i can no longer work, i will still have healthcare through wife. Even worse case i can always go back to turkey. It's hard but not impossible to make such life changes.

But healthcare is just as long as you work for that FAANG.

Once you are out, you are on your own. Not so in Germany.

I quit a FAANG job, purchased insurance, and it was pretty easy—just a couple clicks. Are you saying the government auto-enrolls you in Germany?

> Are you saying the government auto-enrolls you in Germany?

Kinda. Healthcare is not provided by your employers, but by health care insurances. It is generally mandatory to be insured. The system is split in universal healthcare (payed as a percentage of your salary) and private healthcare (payed from your bank account). Anyone self-employed and earning above a certain threshold can opt to leave the government system and buy private healthcare (gives somewhat better treatment, most notably faster appointments at specialists, as they earn 3-5 times on a privately insured patient). When you leave an employer you remain in the system you were in before. If you were privately insured and end up on social security you will be moved to the government system and they will cover healthcare costs for you.

The issue is with "purchasing" insurance. a) you need money, b) what does the health insurance say when you wanna get insurance while having acute expensive health issues?

Getting insurance when you are healthy and have money is easy.

Do you get healthcare when you are not making any money?

I'm not sure which situation you are asking about, but generally if you are not earning money and can't afford health care, you should qualify for social security and that covers healthcare, rent, basic needs. In general it's mandatory to have health insurance and changes in employment status don't affect your insurance status. Though it's possible to end up uninsured when you are unable/unwilling to pay, but also do not apply for social security payments (however I believe that's more an active choice than a real risk).

As a student for example it's mandatory to get insurance to be enrolled in university. Cost for students that are no longer covered by parents (above age 24 iirc) is close to 100€ per month.

I think I'm more talking about the worst worst case i can think of.

A citizen of EU, coming to US, working and making good money, and somehow lose the ability to work. Could they go back, and continue to live reasonable life there without having to worry about things that they normally wouldnt if they haven't come to us in the first place?

I honestly don't know what will happen if I lived for an extended period of time abroad and come back. It might be a reasonable backup plan, but I also don't fancy the idea to uproot my life and lose my social circle when shit hits the fan. Also what if you're divorced and have kids? The situation can quickly get complex with kids not even allowed to leave the state.

I'm not trying to say going to the US is a bad choice, just that there are very sensible reasons not to go that are often overlooked by optimism and my personal experience will always remind me of that.

Thanks - it's definitely not an ideal case, but so is losing your ability to work. It feels like a decent back up plan.

i was on cobra for first 3 months and got onto to obamacare after.

At some point around your thirties, you will probably be married. Your spouse's health care could help hedging for this case, and you can always go back to your home country and utilize what's available to you.

No it's not just FAANG. Just FAANG literally imply only Facebook Apple Amazon Netflix and Google offer healthcare. So I need to find only one more company that does offer healtcare to disprove you. And I'll name Intel where I worked. But likely all companies with 50+ employees offer you healthcare. Also healthcare is not so expensive given the salary you receive. The problem of private healthcare is a serious problem related to people in the USA earning 0-50.000$ a year. After that private healthcare paid in advance costs few hundred dollars per month and you can definitely afford it with a software engineer salary.

> The amount of money you can make in the US as an experienced engineer is probably 5 fold if not more. Senior engineers are easily pulling 7 figures here

This statement is inaccurate for most people.

The salaries for H1B visa holders are actually public [1] and starting salaries for foreigners are more 100k to 200k and nowhere close to 7 figures.

Also the salary levels at FAANGs are mostly known [2] and you have to get very, very far up to even make 7 figures at a fang. An L6 (staff engineer) makes 500k total comp.

[1] https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=Software&city=San+Fra...

[2] https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,SAP,Google&track=Soft...

H1Bs pull the same salaries as everyone else, always the real money is in equity.

When I say senior engineer, i don't mean e5 senior engineer. You can get there within a year or two. You can get to e6 in what it takes to do PhD.

Well, you can also stay at L5 forever. It's a terminal level afterall. L6 typically needs at least 9 years of experience and the majority of people will never reach it. And at L6 you make half of 7 figures.

L5 still make great money and it is a multiple of what you get outside of SV. Just inflating to 7 figures is a bit exaggerated

Edit: this comment from 6 months ago provides a bit of inside view on getting L6 at Google https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965492

Sure. But i think it takes less than 9 to reach to 6 too. Depends on how much you care about it, i suppose (let's say you are really good at what you do, but you may be at e5 because you never cared and your manager never cared either - this sort of stuff happens too).

> Senior engineers are easily pulling 7 figures here, which means even taking into account your cost-of-living, you'll end up fairly ahead.

senior engineers are not "easily pulling" that amount anywhere. that's way outside the senior engineer band at FAANGs/unicorns. you need to be at staff/principal level to get outside of the mid six figures, which is very hard even if you already have a job at one of those companies.

that said, I do kinda agree otherwise. if you are making $200k (typical senior at normal company, between junior/mid-level at FAANG) and are a remotely frugal person, it would take a very unlucky series of events to get to "broke". the risk exists, but from a strictly materialistic viewpoint, the increased upside more than makes up for it.

Yup, expected value is much more. 200k tend to be near starting band these days, and within 5-6 years where you tend to be the healthiest in your life assuming new grad, you can reach 600+ band.

So if something goes tragically wrong and you're unable to do your job not only do you lose your source of income you also lose your healthcare.

I know drastically inflated incomes is the lingua franca of online discussion, but "easily pulling 7 figures" is a bit much, don't you think?

Do you always plan for the worst case? If this is true, could you simply take your money and go back to your home country and still reasonably live there?

I don't always plan for the worst case, I tend to be optimistic, and if something bad comes up, i improvise.

Also if you are a family and your spouse works, this is some sort of hedging for the scenario you mentioned.

The giorgioz comment chain starts from considering all software engineers in Europe moving to US, but then is narrowed down by your definition of 'you' (when i think you mean 'I'), in that 'you' all your examples use, is a person who 1. has a wife with a steady job in US with good health benefits, 2. can achieve senior engineering level E6 in FAANG in 1-2 years... This is immediately like dropping the discussion down to 0.01% of the original chain lol

Fair, but you are over-exaggerating.

Here is what it looks like. - I started working in 2012.

- I didn't come here married

- I married another Turkish woman a few years later, she couldn't work until she were able to get EAD which was probably around 2015/6. H1B spouses couldn't work at the time.

- We got audited for our greencard, and there were frictions in the process for whatever reason. It was no where near as bad as it is for an Indian - we were still able to complete it in about 2 years.

- During greencard process, she got EAD, it took a bit of time as a foreigner educated/non-engineer person find a FTE job. This meant she was on a contract job to build her US resume, and she had to renew every 6 months or so. It is fairly stressful for a person at the beginning of her career in a foreign country and you have to provide support. It also didn't allow us a backup healthcare in case I was out of work.

- I didn't get to 6 in 1-2 years, it took 4, and that was on the faster side at google. It could have been faster at FB, but that's not the point.

All of these are progression in life, nothing is given to you. You can't assume the worst case, because in the worst case everyone is dead tomorrow.

I took a bet to come to US(after a US school, on H1B). I didn't think of what'd have happened if i lost my job, i don't really stress over one of us losing job anymore. If it happens, we deal with it. We always have.

Risk and consequences of losing everything early on is much lower. You don't have expenses, you don't have dependents. You take a bet, and you start building a life. This is why I suggest everyone to do it as soon as possible if they want to leave their home countries.

You start reducing your risk in some things (by getting married) while you increase risk in some others (like getting a bad divorce etc), you add more financial stress if you have a kid, but you have other joys you add through it and so on.

This is not a me story, this is a story that's replicable for most people in FAANG jobs...

Do I plan for the worst case? No, but I take it into consideration.

Can’t you just go back if things go wrong? I don’t understand why your downside isn’t limited.

Software engineers that go to the USA do the H1B visa which only very big employers can offer. Those big employers always offer very good health care plans. You are compensated far more than you would earn in Europe so being laid off is not a problem given with one month salary you can leave off for several months and you will have plenty of other employers trying to hire you given you already have the H1B visa.

Never heard anyone in Germany dreaming of going to Berlin to "make it" as a software engineer, as if there was a mythical Silicon Valley-like atmosphere of opportunity. Correct me if I'm wrong and I'm missing out!

You can go for that Berlin lifestyle and to work in some neat startups (as an underpaid employee) but that's not the canonical definition for succcess imo.

You're talking from a very German centric point of view ;)

But it is true that most startups are in Berlin, even non-German ones open technical offices there. And it's also true that the average German has little interest in going there.

I met plenty of foreigners in software jobs all around Germany, aspiring to and usually achieving that sweet German middle class life; I have not noticed any aspirations from them of heading to Berlin.

I think the dream of finding ambitious and cool people in a hot location and succeed with a true startup, i.e. not something backed or done by people who are already successful or well connected is dead anyway even in Silicon Valley and never really existed anywhere else. Over there however you still have those mystical FAANG salaries...

Dublin and London might be different from Irish and English perspective, respectively.

> I have not noticed any aspirations from them of heading to Berlin.

Yes, the profile of the people that go to Berlin is different from people who'll go to a software job somewhere else in Germany. Very rarely you'll have that situation of someone going internally to Berlin. I might say that Berlin have few engineering offices of the biggest (non-Berlin centered) German companies.

> I think the dream of finding ambitious and cool people in a hot location and succeed with a true startup, i.e. not something backed or done by people who are already successful or well connected is dead anyway even in Silicon Valley and never really existed anywhere else.

Very possible. But the cultural draw of Berlin is much bigger than SV. Hands down.

Dublin and London also attract some profiles (given the companies that go there) but not many people think Dublin is the coolest city.

Well, now I feel that I might have missed out on something during my wandering years...

"Some man's trash is another man's treasure". Plus many young people in their 20s like to live in cool places. Berlin is cool. It's underground, it's edgy, new things are tried, clubs are cool. It's a big city and there are many startup jobs.

What's so attractive about Dublin, Berlin and London? I've never seen them as remotely interesting for devs. London is for sleazy bankers.

Well there's not a great deal going on in somewhere like the middle of the Forest of Dean as far as software engineering challenges go - you do tend to have to go where businesses are solving problems.. even in a more remote culture the base for companies will be near big cities because big cities are near transport links.

I can only speak for London, but:

* Salary

* Way more opportunities

* Big city life, especially attractive to me, since I grew up in a rural, isolated farming town

It's the same story as the last 200 years of industrialisation and urbanisation.

Dublin, a lot of US companies have European headquarters in Dublin. The salary is higher than other EU cities. The cost is higher but if you are in your 20s without kids you can save a lot more than what would save in other cheaper cities with lower salaries. London is big, there are A LOT of things in London. Yes there are more sleazy bankers in London than other places, but London is big, there are lot of things there, don't simplify things that much. It's NOT like 100% of people in Switzerland are only making watches and swiss army knives.

> It's something I've lamented before: Even Americans get kind of brainwashed that their local culture is inferior and everything is better in New York (and California) because that's where so much of our popular media originates and is set.

This reminds me of how Americans are brainwashed into believing that European culture is dramatically better than American culture (Americans are dumb, fat, ignorant, and uncultured while Europeans are intelligent and enlightened). This seems to have eased as our world has become more interconnected, but about a decade ago (before living abroad), this was definitely the impression I had from American media. I'm sure there's some truth to it in certain statistical abstractions, but in general there's enormous variety in America that a comparison of medians doesn't capture. Moreover, there's a lot of cherry-picking that goes on in those comparisons: for instance, I'd never heard any discussion about the significant (~30-50%) discrepancy in take-home (i.e., after tax, healthcare, pension/retirement, etc) income for professionals nor the high cost of living in Europe. Certainly nothing that could feasibly justify stereotypes of American inferiority.

I don't get the link between income and culture here? It feels like you should have ended your post before bringing that up.

I probably wasn't clear, but I was remarking about the belief that European culture and social systems were superior. How much a person takes home is related to the quality of those social systems (it's definitely not the only indicator, but it's one that isn't discussed often).

>discrepancy in take-home

I think that has more to do with the discrepancy in time at work though as well. If I make half as much as someone working 60-70 hour weeks (as someone who works 35 hour weeks), that makes a lot of sense.

According to some quick Googling, this seems unlikely (see below). Europeans do get more paid time off than Americans, but I doubt they're working 30-40% less than Americans.

> The average number of weekly hours worked by full-time workers in the European Union was 37.1 hours a week as of the third quarter of 2021

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1197097/average-working-...

> For those [Americans] in the typical age range for full-time work, the national average landed at 40.5, indicating that most employed adults work a 40-hour workweek

https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-work-hours-per-week/

New York, New York is a film by Martin Scorcese, with a famous song composed by John Kander and Fred Ebb, and performed by Liza Minnelli.

I will grant you that Sinatra's performance is strong, distinctive, even a bit better known. But he stands behind several eminent artists on this one.

> Lots of Americans dream of either LA or New York, depending on their industry.

I was going to post the same thing. What the OP describes is the same in much of the US.

> Even Americans get kind of brainwashed that their local culture is inferior and everything is better in New York (and California) because that's where so much of our popular media originates and is set.

There is something to it: People who are ambitious, confident, and talented tend to want to be around similar people - it gives them opportunities to do more - and around other resources such as financing, leading organizations in their industry, etc. The motivated ones tend to go to NY, etc. So the talent level and resources are generally greater. Seriously, what would you tell a highly ambitious, talented coder in a small town in the middle of Nebraska? Stay where you are? Even in the days of remote work, that seems insane.

> Though I wish we did a better job of fostering diversity of views from other places even within the US.

Agreed.

Seriously, what would you tell a highly ambitious, talented coder in a small town in the middle of Nebraska? Stay where you are?

I'm trying to make a different point than people seem to think I'm making. I have absolutely no idea how to clarify that in comments here. I'm trying to sort my thoughts on the topic elsewhere, which likely means a blog post that likely won't be seen by over 30 people.

Sorry if I misunderstood! I'd be interested in grasping what I'm missing ...

You said you would be interested:

https://butterflyeconomy.blogspot.com/2022/05/place-cutlure-...

The reality is the networking and opportunities in journalism are far superior in New York. There's no better place for advancement than the NYTimes IMO.

Journalism is a hustle.

I strongly agree with your main assertion. I heard several professional journalists recommend "networking" and "effective self-promotion and marketing" to get internships with well-known companies to add to your as the main advice for new journalists, versus focusing their advice on how to do quality reporting to produce good work samples.

However, I speculate that The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post are equivalently great places for advancement for reporters (if only because the NYTimes's new executive editor/editor-in-chief spent much of his career with the WSJ).

In the context of finding the best jobs at the top of an industry, key locations like New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Seattle, and others depending on the industry really are significantly better.

That doesn’t mean you can’t find okay or good jobs in other locations, but if you’re in journalism then it’s far, far easier to get a top job by moving to New York or a small number of other cities than it is by moving to some random small city somewhere.

In this context, if someone is going through all the trouble of emigrating to a different country for their career (a huge amount of work) then it only makes sense to choose the locations best suited for that work. It wouldn’t even begin to make sense if someone uprooted their entire life, switched countries, and then chose Alabama as their home base to launch their national journalism career.

It’s definitely not because people are being swayed by Sinatra songs or other media. These cities really are epicenters for certain industries.

> I imagine in Europe, it's probably Paris and London that draws both French/British and foreigners.

For some people, I'm sure, but don't assume everyone wants the same kind of life.

I could live in London if I chose, and there are some things about it that would be attractive, but on balance I'm far happier with my small-town life 50 miles away.

> I imagine in Europe, it's probably Paris and London that draws both French/British and foreigners.

This is an interesting question. In my experience, there is no European equivalent. Relocating within the EU might be relatively easy visa-wise, but there is often a language barrier and a different culture you’d have to adjust to, which prevents the formation of industry-specific hubs. Depending on the country you’re from, you’ll likely say that your capital is some kind of hub for industry _xyz_, but if you ask citizens from another country in the EU the same question, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d get different answers.

The US is a mostly monolingual "country of countries." They are called states because they were envisioned as separate nation-states who shared an army for purposes of self defense.

The original charter was a sort that historically never really worked anywhere and it was failing to provide funds, iirc, for paying for defense. So they gave the federal government more teeth and it became some weird beast of a sort the world had not seen before.

And here we are, with this strange beast still behaving strangely all these years later.

It's true that there is no similar city advertisement anywhere in Europe, at least nothing on a level close to New York. Funnily, that doesn't prevent however some of the employers to sometimes try presenting their locations (say, Amsterdam or Zürich) in the list of benefits.

"Depending on the country you’re from, you’ll likely say that your capital is some kind of hub for industry _xyz_"

To narrow it down a bit, count only the places having a significant population. It's harder to make that claim for capitals like Ljubljana or Reykjavík.

> I imagine in Europe, it's probably Paris and London that draws both French/British and foreigners.

It's not as true in the UK. The salary differential between a medium city and The City isn't as big so while there's definitely more opportunity and higher pay in London it's wiped out by higher costs of living. Lots of people still move there because they like the lifestyle or to climb the ladder faster but if you're content to be a solid well paid professional there are lots of smaller (but not necessarily small) cities with plenty of opportunity, better work life balance and affordable housing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson called New York City "a sucked orange" (He did not like NY). Once I’ve visited it, I also did not like it. I don’t get the appeal

>Even Americans get kind of brainwashed that their local culture is inferior and everything is better in New York (and California) because that's where so much of our popular media originates and is set.

Because it mostly is. The vast swaths of the inland US are cultural black holes of consumption. There is simply not enough population density, diversity, or opportunity to generate anything meaningful. It's probably hard for Europeans to understand that in the US, I can get in a car, drive a thousand miles in any direction to a new city, get out, and find the exact identical built environment around me, inhabited by the exact same people, speaking the exact same language and accent, wearing the same clothes, eating the same food, driving the same cars, listening to the same music, and practicing the same religion.

Finland and Japan are much more homogenous than the U.S or Canada. Does it make them worse places? In some ways yes and others no. Diversity in itself does not mean much. Yugoslavia was super diverse.

>> the exact same people, speaking the exact same language and accent, wearing the same clothes, eating the same food, driving the same cars, listening to the same music, and practicing the same religion.

That's called a nation.

Ok, but then why not Toronto?

Since New York City has more opportunities and larger scale compared to Toronto the question boils down to a career efficiency and potential future leverage.

If you're going to have to relocate and bust your ass working anyway, then why not take the shot at making a larger impact and trying to reap more rewards in the larger and more prosperous city.

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