Item — HN Reader

>That's an understandable reaction if you just look at the raw USD value, but that's very far from the full picture. They are not pitiful when you start adding the costs for housing, healthcare, transportation and the rest of the things that you need to live.

At $45,284 the US has the highest household net disposable income per capita in the OECD (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/), where "disposable income" (http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46) accounts for healthcare and government benefits.

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And that’s not even specific to tech salaries. A typical Bay Area TC of $250-400k for a senior engineer will also include great healthcare so there is basically no competition in any European location.

You have to specifically want to live in a European city for the culture/walkability/etc or else there is just no reason to take tech jobs there.

> A typical Bay Area TC of $250-400k for a senior engineer will also include great healthcare

Notionally, yes, but in reality it will be the same blighted hellscape of insurance denials, out-of-network complexity, and lack of consistency as everyone else's healthcare in America. You can hire someone to help you navigate it, which is a remarkable economic construct.

You have actually addressed the actual issue here but from wrong perspective.

Culture is the issue here. EU tries to live, USA tries to earn. If the only thing that interests you is money then yes, probably USA is the right direction. Of all the people that I know that went working outside of their country, they were mostly going to EU companies (or USA companies in Europe), sometimes to the Asia. None left for USA. On the other side I know a CTO that left USA for Europe and bought a small property in France where he lives with whole family.

This shows very well in environmental laws, gdpr, protection of workers, actually having friends, nature, having hill-climbing organizations that aren't only lobist groups to be actually allowed to climb the mountains, public transport, able to drink spring water in center of capital city, most people working 40h/week max, actually do use their vacations in one piece, free education, maternity leave measured in years not months (yes under a year too but not month or two),...

So it depends on the personal cultural preference. Some people just love the money and things they can buy with it, maybe even power that it brings and surely a lot of such people are also in EU. The difference is in the percentage of population although Hollywood did great job at exporting the view of world trough money glasses.

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Regarding the topic. EU was quite satisfied with buying processors from the States, it was also happy with using Windows, Android, Apple thing. The problem is, as in every other thing, USA corporations became vampires that wants to eat you alive from pure greed and systemic addiction to blood (endless growth).

It has become imperative to produce our own processors as you can no longer trust USA or China to not shovel inside some spying equipment. Well the times have changed and it is no longer an option to buy it from USA/China, so EU has moved forward and dont worry, we will have our own chips our own phones and operating system (linux, sailfish or something else...).

EU is an elephant and it needs a lot of coordination of muscles to move its legs but once it starts moving...

I am sorry, I would love to just use the USA/China products and not re-develop hardware (based on what we know now, maybe not dragging 40 years old anchor of previous development with me), not having a need for GDPR, but they have both just screwed everything up from pure greed. Now we need to fix it and a lot of time and resources will have to go that way. But we will eventually fix it.

>Of all the people that I know that went working outside of their country, they were mostly going to EU companies (or USA companies in Europe), sometimes to the Asia. None left for USA. On the other side I know a CTO that left USA for Europe and bought a small property in France where he lives with whole family.

Now let me give you actual statistics.

In a survey of scientists from 16 countries (http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...), the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two.

By comparison, only 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada.

Sure, I have never argued with that.

Meanwhile (since 2012) Trump happened, race unrest's, police brutality, corona handling fiasco, Google/FB/Amazon public image is going down, USA public depth has roughly doubled [1] and general perception of USA has changed (to the worse[2]), China is hiring, student depth is going trough the roof (and immigrants want to have children someday), no one believes in "war on terror" any more (talking about EU), Snowden, war on privacy,...

This graph is outdated, did you find some that is up to date? Also interesting one would be how many of those in 2012 survey stayed and where.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/187867/public-debt-of-th...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/09/15/us-image-plumm...

I see that you deleted your further attempt to mock my presenting statistics in exchange for your anecdotes (I had no idea until reading your contributions here that that in the US there is no "actually having friends, nature, having hill-climbing organizations that aren't only lobist groups to be actually allowed to climb the mountains").

But since you did bring up Germany with the deleted mention of Operation Paperclip, I suggest you read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25367731 , in which @bildung and I discuss German migration to the US over the past 30 years (including 2019 data).

"Google/FB/Amazon public image is going down" why would this affect anyone's reason for moving to the USA?

>This graph is outdated, did you find some that is up to date?

I provided statistics in response to your anecdotes. The onus is on you, not me, to prove that a) your anecdotes are actually representative of broader trends, and b) my statistics are, in fact, outdated.

Aren't Europeans interested in ending this brain drain?

> Bay Area TC of $250-400k for a senior engineer

You know not all IT people are senior engineers nor they share vision of the world exported by the Hollywood

You can get the walkability side in any of northeastern cities such as NYC, Boston, and to a lesser extent D.C. Pay is comparable to the Bay given the cost of living difference.

Comparable is generally not true - the difference is maybe ~$30k at best in DC vs. the Bay Area for example, but DC compensation is nowhere near what you can get in the Bay Area. The only thing in the US that beats it it seems is NYC area finance (i.e. hedge funds).

> At $45,284 the US has the highest household net disposable income per capita in the OECD (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/), where "disposable income" (http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=46) accounts for healthcare and government benefits.

There's a catch, though: You have to live in the borderline failed state that is the USA. That's quite the drawback and just not worth it no matter the salary increase, imo.

"Disposable income per capita" is certainly a number, but it's not actually meaningful in this context for a few reasons:

1. "Disposable income per capita" is irrelevant to normal people, as it does not account for how equally that wealth is actually spread. If the top 1% double their income and the rest halves it, that's still a net increase in "disposable income".

2. "Disposable income" does not at all account for the varying amount of cost required to sustain a given standard of living in different regions, even within a country.

3. "Disposable income" is a purely economic measure. As such, it does not measure a large amount things that impact your quality of life, like time off, stress, job satisfaction, etc. A quick look at those non-economic measures will show those high economic measures don't come for free.