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Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

I am a Sr. Dev at FAANG in America, but I yearn to go back to my home country in Europe. However doing so would result in a massive paycut, even with prospective high paging jobs. One possibility is to transfer internally with my current employer, but in this economic setting it's unlikely they will approve my request, much less allow me to work full remote, which is a deal breaker.

I have been contemplating freelancing for a while as a way to work remotely from home with a competitive salary (not US level, but better than EU market rate). I have decent experience as a Big Tech Sr. Dev. on ML/MLOps (e.g. I designed and implemented a real time inference service serving millions of RPS with single digit millisecond latency), so I believe my skills should be in demand.

Do you believe this is attainable or I am deluding myself?

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You can always try this out first by searching for contract work as if you were in your home country. Just set up a website (perhaps not using your real name, in case your employer gets suspicious) and see if you can actually seek out the work. You can even try to purchase advertising on Google to see if you get any clicks / contacts. Overall it's a pretty cheap way to check.

I get that this may not be possible, but these sorts of trial balloons are much easier to float first to get an idea instead of taking a leap of faith.

Unfortunately my L1 visa doesn't allow me to have any other source of income than my current employer. But definitely this is something to look into once I get a Green Card.

Sorry for being unclear, I meant to just go through the process of seeing what you could get in terms of contracts as if you had already made the move, not to actually follow through and start any contract.

Some of the "expat threads" I've seen on Reddit where people yeet themselves to the other side of the world and hope it works out only to fall flat on their face are pretty eye opening. By testing the waters with "proto-contracting" like this, you can at least give yourself some idea of what you could get were you to move.

edit: grammar

Have you factored in the possibility you can go bankrupt in America anytime out of healthcare bills?

You can also go bankrupt anytime if you don't bring in enough money to cover all your other expenses, both in the US and in many other places. Yes, healthcare in the US is expensive if a company isn't picking up a big chunk of the insurance tab but it's hardly the only large expense people have to cover somehow.

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