Does github still use Rails in a sort of monolith? I like examples of "monoliths" in the wild that gasp scale as well / better than dozens of microservices painfully working together just to show me a metrics dashboard. Dont get me wrong, not against microservices, it's just that more often than not such architectures have brought more pain than good in my career. I will most of the time gladly trade the overhead of maintaining/managing microservice-glue-infrastructure for a large modular monolith.
Germany! Yeah, I feel you on the socially "stuck" part. I've been over here almost 6 years and it took at least 3 to get a social life going. Perhaps I'm just not outgoing enough, perhaps there are a lot of other factors at play. I would say that making friendships in US is a lot easier on the whole, but this is based on anecdotal experience and not any sort of hard evidence. There are many US immigrants here who echo similar experiences. I found my first good friends were also immigrants and then later made a few close German friends.
Okay same situation right here. Seriously, if anyone has suggestions especially for the mobile syncing workflow with linux I would love to hear them. The seamless message-notiifcation experience with Apple is what holds me hostage.
I did the reverse. American who moved to EU for work. I would say go for it! Unless you land a gig in Silicon Valley or working for FAANG tho, I would tamper your expectations of the salary in the States being that much better than (Western) Europe. I would never say not to do it though, I think it will be "worth" it 100% regardless of potential monetary compensation increases.