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Comment by willcipriano | Hacker News Reader

My wife is a UK citizen and we have considered moving there, but even when I was a lowly two years of experience sysadmin they couldn't put up a salary that made sense (and yes that factors healthcare into account).

You'd think they are at a wage floor already but it seems that it can go lower.

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I suspect you're a US citizen?

In general EU salaries seem very low compared to US ones. (saying EU in general, not that the UK is EU anymore).

Its important then to compare to your contemporaries, and to understand quality of life instead of absolute numbers. It's apples to oranges.

I'm in the US.

I don't really see how my standard of living would go up going from owning my own home to living in a tiny apartment. Different strokes for different folks of course but for me it would be a big drop in standard of living.

You have the benefit of suburbia, where you can let your kids bike around like in Stranger Things and maybe even have joint backyards. In other places houses are conspicuous and unsafe, whereas sets of apartment buildings can afford joint facilities like swimming pools, treadmills and lifting equipment, not to mention safe space for kids to run around. This isn't necessarily better than your situation; it's just that suburbia has been heavily subsidized in the US and not so much elsewhere.

> benefit of suburbia

I'll be moving soon, it's starting to get a little hairy around here. There have been a few incidents in the past few years involving drug addicts. One crashed into a utility pole on my property, another crashed into mine and several cars parked on the street and was arrested screaming on my neighbors lawn. The convenience store across the street has overdoses happening on a regular basis that EMS responds to. We often get accosted by people for money when we walk over there. Point being it's nothing like Stranger Things my kid can't ride a bike around town here.

That said I can move about an hour or two into the middle of Pennsylvania close to the area I grew up in and it's like what you picture. It's also about half the price in terms of home values and that's not factoring in the larger minimum lot sizes. This is a great starter home for a young family, but once my daughter is older I want her to live in a place were she won't have to deal with this crap.

You don't have to live in a tiny apartment, you can live anywhere you want but you'll have to commute.

Public transport being half decent means you don't have to actively drive everywhere freeing up time for yourself, even if you have a long commute.

I don't think there's many owning their own houses in NYC or DTLA, it's weird to compare like this.

> You don't have to live in a tiny apartment, you can live anywhere you want but you'll have to commute.

Running the numbers I couldn't afford it. Property is very expensive in the UK. We have a few of her relatives come visit and they kept telling me how big my house is, they kept bringing it up and I thought it was British sarcasm and they were being assholes because my house is less than 1200 sq feet on a third of acre. They were being genuine. My house is one of the smallest in my town, I don't think you can even legally build them this small anymore.

> I don't think there's many owning their own houses in NYC or DTLA, it's weird to compare like this.

I don't live there for the same reason, I can make more money but it will all go to paying rent for a tiny apartment.

If they were saying how big your house is at only 1200sqft it's not because that's such a huge building we in the UK can't imagine such big houses, it was almost certainly a specific comment about your personal situation feeling that you didn't need that much space (or they were indeed assholes and being sarcastic, if it is one of the smallest in the town then maybe they did want to tease about that).

Not to say that UK properties aren't smaller on average as not only are we obviously a much smaller country but we also have a greater proportion living in higher population density areas, as less people here are happy to live outside towns/cities than in the US.

Coming from Germany, I was shocked at the property prices in the UK. Living here for a short while, it seems to me that cost of living at a certain standard is higher than or at least similar to many parts of the US, while salaries are closer to European levels, maybe 1.2x-1.5x in London. Commuting from a smaller city close by, e.g. Reading<-> London comes out to >£5k/year for public transport, and getting there by car takes ages because the city is not designed to handle large amounts of traffic(IMO)

>public transport being half decent

I think you're living in a different England to me.

Visit the US, especially outside of the main cities and you will gain a new appreciation for British public transport.

"half"-decent is an appropriate term.

*Public transport existing Better? You leave a metropolitan area in the states and you are SOL without your own means. Or you could sell all the "extra" organs you have and buy a train ticket.

And the UK actually has pretty decent tech sector wages compared to many other European countries.

Indeed, the UK-ans have it pretty good on that island in terms of tech jobs and pay vs most of their continental neighbors. In most other western EU countries wages are even more depressing than the UK if you don't have big-tech companies in your area or a low tax-rate self employment scheme to make remote job opportunities appealing (looking at you Austria).

Except Switzerland, of course. But you are right, salaries in Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands can only be described as an insult to developers.

You get screwed royally in Europe, but only screwed half way in Switzerland and the UK. You'll still earn half your US counterparts, and pay more in taxes for the privilege.

I moved to Iceland, and it's pretty much like you say England is. Half the salary, and worse health care than the US by far. If you factor in taxes, and the portion of my taxes that goes to the health care system (61%) I pay more than I did with excellent health care coverage in my US tech jobs. Inflation is running rampant, further fueled by a post-covid tourism boom, and salaries haven't budged in years.

for these things you can't just do a currency conversion. you've to adjust both salaries to PPP terms. but yeah roughly a decently paid mid-western techie will have around(~10-20%) the same take home pay as a decently paid uk techie

Moving from where?

I took a big paycut to move out here. It has tradeoffs and I'm relatively young without family, but yeah it is a little annoying seeing intra-company peers making 30% more to do the same thing. My bet is that an island is easier to defend from mass migration once the water wars kick off in a few decades - and it's pretty fun to travel about Europe in the meantime.

> once the water wars kick off in a few decades

?? could you provide some details about this? i thought water is a non issue because we have incredible amounts of it that just needs energy to desalinate, energy which will come very cheap in a couple of decades.

I think modernised nations will be able to produce that sort of massive energy, and are also less likely to be impacted by climate change related droughts/famines in the first place. Unfortunately and unjustly it's the poor countries along the equator that are f*cked, and unless some crazy political restructuring happens these countries don't have a shot of updating their economies fast enough to desalinate their way out of oblivion.

Cheap energy has always been a few decades away...

I wondered whether they were referring to rising sea levels, but then it would make a lot more sense to go to Norway.

> just needs energy to desalinate

That's a very load-bearing "just". Germany is busy shooting itself in the head by turning off their nuclear reactors.

>> My bet is that an island is easier to defend from mass migration

Not currently if you look at the boats crossing the channel.

That's only because things aren't serious yet. If there were dedicated political will the channel could be handily sealed off, and it's great that we aren't in such a dire place yet but were it to arise those boats would never make it.

The argument, rarely said explicitly except by talk radio hosts, is that the navy will be deployed to either mass murder them directly or to hole their boats and leave them to drown. As happens in the Mediterranean.

(This is obviously a crime, so special legislation will be enacted to let the state murder undesirables)

At the moment, the French navy shadows them into british waters, and then the RNLI provides a taxi to shore for them. They then manage to remain in the UK indefinitely.

And the people smugglers make about £5k per person for the migrants.

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