I have been offered increase in pay to work in LA/SanFran/NY/UK/SouthAmerica/UAE and each time I knock it back because each time I have visited those places I could not wait to leave them. UAE was twice the money. The cost and conditions of life in Au are so much better.

Can concur, as an Aussie expat having spent 7 years in NYC/NJ returned to a much better lifestyle in WA before my kids ever have to go to a school in the US.

No longer have to worry about gun violence, surprise bankrupting medical bills & an anti-intellectual population prolonging the devastation of a virus that's killed >500k of the fellow population.

There's going to be better opportunities to work for mega tech conglomerates in the US but I'd expect great devs will be able to get hired remotely, although the salary for IT professionals is pretty decent in Australia as well.

Definitely agree. I've had the opportunity to visit and work in Australia (Melbourne in particular, love that city). Everyone is so much friendlier than in the USA.

No one understands the weird cultural shit we (USA) have around guns / healthcare.

The big cities in Australia have lots of cultures melting together, great food, even better coffee, and decent transit. What more could you want?

There are plenty of places that aren't California that still pay double or triple the salary that devs make in Australia

that's cool but you can't fix all the problems in usa with triple salary.

> healthcare > unlimited homelessness, in one day in la i saw more homelessness people then in my entire life in australia, this was only eclipsed by san fran. now i get why devs are leaving california, i wouldn't raise a family there. > gun violence > political instability > terrible pre-12 education system. > general shitty american population (why do you need to clap and chant so much)

> > gun violence > political instability > terrible pre-12 education system. > general shitty american population (why d

Well, one of these things is most definitely not like the others.

Gun violence exists only on media outlets. However 600k/year deaths from cancer is very real and the US healthcare won't miss a chance to bankrupt those people before they die.

In a life in Australia I got shot at once by a guy who thought I was a kangaroo and apologised, in five years in the us, I had guns drawn on me 5 times twice by police on one occasion at least five guns, twice by strangers unprovoked threatening to kill me, and once more or less abducted. I love California, I really really love it, but gun violence and the threat of it is not a media beat up. The difference in the feeling of threat in us v Australia is quite different, on average, there are places in Australia that are not safe, and in the end I believe the causes are the same, there are places in both countries where the inequality is brutal, and where the sanctioned violence that maintains economic disparity is on clear display

The risk of being shot in the US is below obscure kidney problems. Guns is a microscopic problem in the US that looks big only under the media's microscope. The real elephant is cancer.

I agree with you. But I also think that there is threat of potential violence that is unfamiliar to people from quiet little countries like Australia.

I never got shot and killed in the US, not even once. But the fear of gun violence is real, not just as a subjective experience but as a tool, Switzerland has more guns, but the US is unusual in that it is both a democracy and has so many guns on display. The standard response to this from my side of politics is to say that the US needs gun control. My feeling is that the US is different because the US is different, it’s bigger, more complex and there are greater and more numerous tensions and conflicts than the other Anglo/euro democracies. Americans relationship to their government and the culture around personal responsibility and political participation is very different to the disconnected disinterest in my own country. So I don’t want US gun culture exported, and I don’t want my kids living in it. But when you read things like:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Coalfield_War

It seems there is an intimate connection between the generative political culture of the United States, that doesn’t shy away from conflict in pursuit of ideals, and gun culture, that cannot be easily separated. I believe there is something in American culture that calls people to intervene, that urges facing into conflict, even violence in pursuit of higher ideals that is both useful and destructive, even if we could never tally the full cost, in short order we can produce horrific numbers, but I believe this same imperative drives vital movements like feminism, gay rights, anti racism that inspire required changes in my country. So I both agree with you and think you’re missing the point. Cancer, heart disease, dementia are numerically vastly greater killers, but as an outsider from Australia coming to the US the underlying conflict in the society is hard to come terms with, it is much better hidden in Australia. I think my experience is common, I will always regret leaving the US. I adjusted to that sense of threat that personally, and I think I would have tolerated it if I had stayed and had children there, but I can’t bring myself to move my children there.

The fear of gun violence is imaginary. The media instills the fear because, quoting the Chomsky propaganda model, "when people fear, they accept authority". Most people in the US wouldn't know gun ownership is a thing, because most of them will never see a gun unless they go to a range.

My hypothesis as to why the new US administration is so fixated on gun control is that they really need to import big piles of migrants to do the low rung labor, but if that new underclass gets guns, things will go downhill. So their plan is to pack the supreme court with anti-gun judges (to bypass the bill of rights) and take the guns. They seem to be trying the Australian scenario where a possibly manufactured shooting was used as an excuse to ban guns.

Hang on are you suggesting Port Arthur was a a 'false flag' operation? If that is what you are saying? I have to ask whether you have done sufficient investigation to make such a claim. It is a statement that has potential to deeply offend and hurt, shouldn't be said lightly without robust evidence. I think you're seriously over estimating the organisational capacity of the Australian government and intelligence services (if you want to see the abysmal record of the Australian Intelligence services, look up hilton hotel bombing) and seeing shadows of the US political landscape in the Australian landscape - they aren't the same. The government in power in Australia at the time was conservative, and they did not want to introduce gun control. We don't have the same gun culture here, in a large part because right or wrong people don't believe the government has the competency and capability to pull off tyranny.

NYC is one of them. Still requires you relocate 10000 miles away from your friends and family, which isn't for everyone.

Williamsburg has a large population of Australian expats. The Australian dev we just relocated already had a good 10 friends there.

NYC is the only place in the US I was actually impressed by, and if I was a single guy with no family I could consider living there. Everywhere else I traveled was meh.

Where did you go though? I mean it's kind of a huge place.

I mean Manhattan, the touristy parts.

> war zone in California

What? I mean, I don't live there and I don't really like it there (except the central coast region) but that characterization is a bit much.

I used to think Skid Row was just a band name. Then I read this whole article and then noped out of LA https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_Row,_Los_Angeles

Aussie eng here.. life in Norway is amazing.

How does the pay compare? I got paid twice as much in Aus vs Sweden & got better health care down under too

Where exactly is this war zone in California...?

Growing up in the sticks I'd heard so much about it and had hilariously low expectations when I went out for an internship, but then I found out that it's a fucking amazing place. I swear there's got to be a decades long campaign to make outsiders think the place is terrible in an attempt to keep density down. Honestly, I'd be perfectly happy if so. Don't want my paragliding ocean bluffs overpacked with people. :P

While I agree that the other poster was being a bit dramatic, it's no stretch to say that California performs objectively poorer in a number of areas that people tend to pay attention to. Just take one crime - the murder rates in California are 4.3 per 100,000 and only 0.8 in Australia.

I can see why some people could see a 450% increase in the likelihood of being murdered as a comparitive warzone.

> the murder rates in California are 4.3 per 100,000 and only 0.8 in Australia.

But isn't that true of most of the U.S. We have more crime everywhere than most the rest of the world. And especially violent crime.

Looks like (from a quick googling, may be something I'm not taking into account here) violent crime is actually more common in Australia than in California.

Australia 692 violent assaults per 100k [1]

California 430 assaults per 100k [2]

So, you'd also be trading more of a rare really bad thing for less of a relatively common bad thing.

1 - https://www.osac.gov/Country/Australia/Content/Detail/Report....

2 - https://www.ppic.org/publication/crime-trends-in-california/....

An obvious flaw is that it's comparing an entire country to a singular (and disporoprotionately wealthy) state. If you expanded the rate to America in general the violent crime rate is around 800 per 100k, and if you reduced "Australia" to "New South Wales" then you also see a similar drop - but the site doesn't provide an easy to consume summary.

The web app doesn't seem to support direct linking to query results, but it's in here: http://crimetool.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/bocsar/ under Assault - Non Domestic.

At the end of the day though - people tend to consider being murdered a significantly more disruptive event than getting punched in the face.

> An obvious flaw is that it's comparing an entire country to a singular state.

California has a much larger population and twice the economic output of Australia. It seems much more reasonable to compare Australia to one state than to compare it to the entire US.

but the characteristics of your immediate living zones are not comparable. Sydney and San Fran would be comparable regardless of their populations

Why would you compare it to the US? The US has an order of magnitude more people. California is comparable in population. The right thing to do would be to compare the locales where you would spend time in each place, e.g. the violent crime rate in your neighborhood or would-be neighborhood matters most, then city, and maybe state.

That assumes assaults in the US are reported the same way. Murders probably are because there is a body. I doubt I her crime is given the weird incentives in the US system.

This is one case in which crime metrics are completely useless for getting an image of what it actually “feels” like to live in a city. American cities are incredibly segregated by economic and racial class. Crime is everywhere, but largely centered in a few especially poor areas. Outside of the core economic centers (and I’m talking neighborhoods), large swaths of the people who work and live in SF are living predictable and safe lives.

I replied above, but read this whole page. Like wtf do places like this exist in America?! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_Row,_Los_Angeles

Market St in SF is what most Australians see when attending conferences. The homelessness, human waste, open drug use, and visibly serious mental illness is pretty confronting for anyone not used to it, and that's at daytime - it gets significantly scarier at night if you make the mistake of walking back to your hotel. I've never understood why all the hotels international guests stay in are in by far the worst neighborhood.

It's grodey and depressing but hardly a "war zone".

Last time I was there, someone was openly defecating in front of city hall, next to multiple people shooting heroin. I had to step over someone who had collapsed apparently from drug use, in front of a restaurant entrance, and nobody seemed to care. It's about as close to the third world as exists in the west. I recognize there's extremely nice parts of SF, but most out of state/international guests stay around Tenderloin/SOMA and would never know that.

I stayed in Tenderloin and was shocked when walking back to hotel people having sex on the footpath in front of their tent, while a few tents down someone shooting up. Then what looked like a 14 year old (at most) prostitute soliciting at the corner.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the depths of the Philippines, and never saw anything that bad... and that was during a single stroll to the hotel!

I'm not sure if you appreciate how utterly surreal that visage is to someone who is 3 hours off a flight from Sydney.

It honestly feels like a scaled down version of the slums you see in South Africa butting right up against typical suburban homes.

Sure I do. I'm from picturesque, rural Montana. My first visit to LA in the 90s was quite shocking. But a war zone implies a level of lawlessness that doesn't apply. Most of what is going on, people using drugs, using the bathroom on the street, etc, it isn't good but it doesn't really affect you. In a war zone, you have high odds of being maimed or killed any second for no good reason. It's a poor analogy. I think the homelessness is a problem we need to desperately to address but this kind of militant rhetoric doesn't help at all. In fact for several decades here it has made things worse.

People in San Francisco will threaten you with violence just for wearing a nice-looking jacket. Nothing about that is healthy.

I lived near 5th and Market and walked to a tech company I love very much near Giants Stadium. This is a short walk. One place I regularly walked by was the site of a random slaying by a person who had been released from prison after being arrested for randomly assaulting people in the same place years before.

> Where exactly is this war zone in California...?

No idea how universal these things are in all of California, but nearly every Australian that visits LA and a few other areas come back with stories about hearing gunshots from the hotel, accidentally ending up in a seedy/crime ridden part of town or something similar. This is very alien to us and more in line with what we'd see on the news from Somalia. Statistics like homicide rates and gun crime show there's at least some truth it.

We're also a fairly egalitarian society, so much more likely to judge other nations on how well off the poorest are and not the richest.

I have lived in LA county for more than 25 years and lived in East Hollywood ~1 year. I have never heard gunfire anywhere in LA. I'm sure it happens in the worst areas but I've never heard it and I've been around plenty of recreational gunfire (outside of LA).

Do you think it's possible they're mistaking gunfire with fireworks? There are plenty of fireworks here.

> I'm sure it happens in the worst areas

I think the fact that those areas exist comes as a shock to Australians, who are used to gun control and probably never heard let alone seen a single gun in their lifetime

The poster was being hyperbolic. I love California, but as on outsider I didn’t have the sense of which areas were or weren’t dangerous, and to be honest just couldn’t read it, and got myself into dangerous situations. That would never happen in Australia because I can read people and places in ways, and it surprises me that this is true, that I seemed to be culturally blind to in the US. I’m still confused about Compton, to my eyes it read as an easy going middle class neighborhood, is it? - was Dre exaggerating all this time? . In both LA and Oakland (where I mostly lived) there were nights where there was extended gunfire. To be honest this happens in Australia too, but I assume that it’s people out hunting. Oh hang on - I take that back the Proudlock brothers used to shoot each other with air rifles.

sssshhhhhh

I agree personally that it's not about money, but It's an individual scale I guess

Plus, you can get great money working at one of the FAANGs that are here. It's not quite at the level of the US, but higher than the companies the GP was referring to from what I've heard of their comp.

That's extremely subjective. It's entirely dependent on what your preferences are. Even an objective comparison cannot account for individual tastes.