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Comment by ascar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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