It is less about the skills. With a good platform, your skills will transfer to higher value (I mean money really) than average platforms. It is not like the person with highest score in class end up with the biggest house. There is only one Facebook, one Google, one Amazon, one Microsoft and one Apple, and the US has all of them.

> Of course, there's other stuff - 30 (working) days of paid vacation, solid and cheap education, solid medical coverage (I consider $50 medical bill damn high) etc.

I worked at FAANGs in Silicon Valley for many years. I always got at least 20 vacation days, 10-12 holidays (like Christmas or July 4th), excellent insurance plans and could pay off my 40-45K education loan in a breeze. Total cost of private education is ~25K per child.

If you have a Software job at a FAANG in SV, it will be better than almost any other arrangement in Europe (exception: Zurich) even after taking into account vacation days, insurance premiums, California taxes, private schools cost and probability of gun violence.

I am curious what's special about Zurich that makes it an exception?

> 30 (working) days of paid vacation > solid and cheap education > solid medical coverage

Unfortunately none of these are uniform across Europe. I only have 20 days of vacation, medical coverage is horrible, with 2-3 month waiting lists for even an MRI, and education is absolutely horrid.

I wouldn't even call them free, nor cheap: income taxes come out to about ~35%, and VAT is the highest in the world.

And to add on to that, achieving compensation above ~80k usd is basically impossible. With ~3 years of experience I barely get half of that at a Google L4 level equivalent.

This has been my experience. I have 25 vacation days, medical coverage is NOT free, as I pay it from my gross monthly income (around 400 euros per month) and waiting lists for an MRI are weeks or months long and generally it's very superficial coverage for a healthy person in their 30s. Income and other taxes are damn high for what you actually get out of it.

The quality of social services and healthcare in EU countries is grossly overestimated. One can easily be left behind with no support American-style in countries like Spain, Italy, Poland, Czechia, not even mentioning Bulgaria or Romania. In countries with developed services and healthcare like Germany of Finland, the language barrier will heavily handicap one's ability to even benefit from them.

One simply sees their paycheck cut by ~40% monthly and in case of crisis situation is always put at the end of the queue as a low priority applicant. That's ranging from irritating to infurating depending on the urgency of one's problems.

My experience with "free" healthcare is horrible. I almost died because of waiting times and incompetence and it costs so much in tax, I could pay for a quite comprehensive private insurance for the money and you most of the time end up paying privately anyway, although private healthcare is not as expensive as in the US.

That's the unfortunate reality of working in Europe I think, especially in a lower cost of living country. I've just moved from Germany to the UK, and my salary has increased in gross terms (and an associated significant increase in net), but I lose many of the German provisions/safety nets that the high taxes pay for over there.

In California, if you're making over a million dollars you're looking at 50.3% marginal income tax i believe, which is a lot more than the 35% cited by the parent as "expensive" and you're probably getting a lot less

I can say without hesitation, that that's a problem I'd like to have.

Besides housing, healthcare, and maybe barbers, everything is either cheaper, or costs the same as it is in most of Europe.

So you'd still keep 500K, right? I could live with such salary,even in SV

You're forgetting about the tax deduction for interest payments on your home, which you've front loaded so that you only pay off the principle after you've retired.

Genuine question, I have always wondered about this regarding EU based FAANG roles (I am making the leap that you are EU based):

How statistically common/likely is it for EU based engineers to move to the US on a L-1 visa, specifically at google?

I didn't work at google, but of the people I know, if H1B wasn't an option they would usually push through an O1.

The median daily rate for sofware contractors in the UK is apparently around $500, which is probably over $100k/year.

I guess that stops counting as Europe fairly soon, though.

> sofware contractors

Contractors always earn more than employees though don't they?

Yes, but they're still software developers: most teams I've worked on have had plenty of contractors. It seems like the more experienced developers either stay permie and move into architecture/management or become contractors. There are plenty of "contractors in name only", too.

As a SV engineer I’m having the opposite experience hearing those numbers. It sounds way below market rates.