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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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?
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.
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...
Once you are out, you are on your own. Not so 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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 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.
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.
If needed, my email is in my profile.
This basically skips the daunting process that's H1B lottery.
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)
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
Generally, any big East Coast city. NYC, Atlanta, Washington DC, Chicago, and Boston would be top of mind.
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.
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.
* 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.