This is UK

...are you hiring? :)

If you are serious then I think trading firms are actively hiring. There’s a bunch of them in London jump, Jane etc. comp will be very high there. I think faang hiring is slower now, but not sure

I was mostly joking but might start looking in the new year. I'll keep trading firms on my radar, cheers!

ouch ... that hurt

This is why we Europeans like working at American companies (in Europe)

Now the question is where to find American companies willing to do B2B/freelance contract without location-adjusted bs.

Nowhere in Europe unless you want to never have free time during daytime. If they don't location adjust, they expect you to be available in their timezone.

If you're OK with that, just visit the US and make some friends. Go to meetups and conferences. You will definitely find something much better than any EU offer (while still wildly underpaid in California) - that's your starting point. Do a good job, underpromise and overdeliver, and ask for referrals.

What you call "location adjusted bs" is actually just supply and demand.

The supply of good, experienced software developers willing to work for $100k in the Bay Area is practically non-existent when "normal", nothing-special suburban houses there can go for a couple million. There are a much higher supply of developers willing to work for that in Poland because the CoL is so much lower.

Similarly, a gigantic reason American companies hire overseas in the first place is because wages are lower outside the US. Without that wage differential most of those jobs wouldn't exist.

Not with that attitude

Germany needs to regulate a mandatory posting of the pay range with every job being posted. The power dynamic is very skewed towards employers because when you send in your application, you must also indicate your pay expectations but employers (except select few) never post the pay ranges. In the end what happens is that, two seniors in the same team will earn in 50-70% difference while doing the same duties.