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Ask HN: Thinking of moving to Europe from USA

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Re: Ask HN: Thinking of moving to Europe from USA

#131

Post by nerfhammer »

drakonka wrote: post #8

Does the US have a working holiday visa arrangement with Europe? This is how I moved, but I was moving from Australia. Got my Australian citizenship and applied for working holiday visa to Sweden. Visa documentation was emailed to me within a couple of weeks of the application. This allowed me to move with my savings and look for a job on-site. The employer I found then helped me out with the process of applying for…

The US has working holiday arrangements with only Canada, Australia, Ireland, South Korea, and New Zealand. In contrast Australia has dozens of countries they can do this with. It's just a bigger part of the culture there, most Americans aren't aware of the existence of working holiday programs.

Re: Ask HN: Thinking of moving to Europe from USA

#132

Post by taway_1212 »

ma2rten wrote: post #93
taway_1212 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't ignore the demand side of the equation though. US is leading economic and military (which leads to lots of tech as well) superpower and a lot of European countries are relatively backwater in comparison. For example, in the UK, there's little real tech companies and most developer roles are confined to non-tech support roles in other economy sectors (finance, retail etc.).

I did a search on the most recent How's Hiring thread to see how many jobs are offered in each city. I think it's fair to assume that most people posting there are "real tech companies": San Francisco: 170 New York: 96 London: 90 Boston: 38 Berlin: 34 I just did a full text search so there might be some double counting.

> I think it's fair to assume that most people posting there are "real tech companies":

That is debatable and depends largely on a definition. My viewpoint is that a large portion of the companies in the current VC-inspired "tech" world are merely applying tech and not really developing it. For every company like Datastax there's a dozen of companies which are just applying tech solutions (packaged and sold by other companies) to a specific business/consumer problem.

Or, to put it in other terms, if the job offer does not say "Msc/PhD in X preferred" (where X is the job, like distributed systems, deep learning etc.), then it's likely not quite a "real tech" job.

Re: Ask HN: Thinking of moving to Europe from USA

#133

Post by scrollaway »

ColanR wrote: post #98
scrollaway wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can cite that price from personal experience :) You said healthcare is of "questionable quality". Everything has its problems but as far as I'm concerned, healthcare in europe is top notch. You certainly don't hear about "healthcare horror stories" in europe, unlike in the US... I'm not sure what "worse off financially" even means. It depends. For a long time I was working from home for an international company and…

And yet you still don't disprove his point. "More than needed in a year" doesn't deny a relatively inferior financial position.

Is "working 1 month to be well off for the entire year" an inferior financial position to you?

I have news for you: for nearly the entire rest of the world, it's not. Leave your bubble for the new year, will ya?

Re: Ask HN: Thinking of moving to Europe from USA

#134

Post by verbify »

kobeya wrote: post #124
bosie wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wasn't able to save nearly as much as I did in NYC Never having lived in the US, is the savings you are talking about in terms of percentage of your cost? i.e. if the only cost you have is rent and its 2800 vs 700, i would need to save at least 4 times as much to cover the difference.

Typically these are measured in absolute numbers. I'm not sure why you'd want to measure as relative ratios.

The ratio of savings:spending lets me know when I can retire early.

Using exaggerated figures, if I earn 100k in the US, save 10k a year but I spend 90k, then it's going to take me longer to retire than if I earn 35k in Europe, spend 30k and save 5k. Because in the US, it'll take 9 years to save enough to live off one year, while in Europe it'll take six years to do the same.

Of course you can move to a cheaper country when you retire, but you'll have to rebuild your friendships, adjust to the culture, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Thinking of moving to Europe from USA

#135

Post by chx »

tbarbugli wrote: post #105
iagooar wrote: post #85

I assume you want a career as a software engineer. This is my list: - Berlin: cheap (getting expensive quick, but still cheap for a large city), multicultural (many, many people from all around the world, lots of people speak English, those who don't usually understand you), Germans themselves are very open and interesting as a nation. Berlin has a vibrant startup scene, which is nice for getting your first job as a…

I would not suggest Germany or (german) Switzerland to people that don't speak german.

And why not, especially Berlin?

Re: Ask HN: Thinking of moving to Europe from USA

#136

Post by cylinder »

Noseshine wrote: post #104
cylinder wrote: post #5

The New World is better for fresh starts than Europe.

Source? Not just an opinion please, I mean an actual source - with facts, figures, data. Also, you would have to define what you actually mean by "better" (as well as what "fresh start" really means). Details. What kind of person (with enough relevant details to actually be a useful description) doing what can expect what based on what where exactly (US and Europe are both huge and very diverse places)?

I'm not obligated to provide a "source." It's called an opinion. If one seeks merely a "fresh start," then just move somewhere else in the USA. If frustrated with the government, politics, culture of the USA, then move to Europe or some other country.

Re: Ask HN: Thinking of moving to Europe from USA

#137

Post by jupiter90000 »

bosie wrote: post #128
kobeya wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically these are measured in absolute numbers. I'm not sure why you'd want to measure as relative ratios.

Because i need to be able to cover the costs (i.e. what is the savings in terms of purchasing power rather than absolute savings). If i lose my job tomorrow and my rent is 2800, I don't really care that i save 1k compared to 700 per month (under the assumption i can't increase the purchasing power of my savings somehow).

One idea is that by investing a larger amount of money while living in an expensive area, later moving to a less expensive area (perhaps upon retirement, etc) will leave you with more assets to work with than if you had stayed working in the less expensive area the whole time (and investing a great deal less due to lower wages).

Re: Ask HN: Thinking of moving to Europe from USA

#138

Post by kbouck »

bane wrote: post #121

Europe is great. I have several friends who've made this move. I'd say that they have a higher and more relaxed quality of life at a much lower salary than I know of in the U.S. Salaries are lower, taxes are higher, but I think it balances out well. One thing I've noticed is that if you're willing to live a bit outside of a major city and along a commuter rail line (a commute not extraordinary by U.S. standards but s…

> pension

If you move to Europe, build up a pension, and then move back to the U.S., you should be able extract the money from that pension (according to the conditions), regardless of where you reside in there future.

> taxes

You are obliged to report all of your foreign earnings to the IRS as well as all of your foreign bank account status each year. You are taxed on your income both in the local country and in the US :-/, but the US amount is only on income above a certain threshold. Maybe someone can correct me but I think the current amount is somewhere around $90k USD. Like my parent poster said, there are deductions, so find a good tax adviser that is familiar with both local and US tax laws.

Re: Ask HN: Thinking of moving to Europe from USA

#139

Post by taway_1212 »

oddsockmachine wrote: post #107
sadok wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agreee with you. As a mexican with no college degree (I'm entirely self-taught), one of my 'career dreams' is to work at a company like Airbnb, Uber, Google, Facebook, etc, but the lack of work visa, or in this case, US citizenzhip, makes it IMPOSSIBLE for me unless I do some crazy stuff like getting an O-1 visa (extraordinary ability). I was offered a Product Design position at Medium but I couldn't move forward b…

There's always the L-1B visa option: work for a company that has offices both in the US and somewhere you can already work. After one year, apply to transfer to the US offices.

That's unfortunately not comparable to a citizenship. With the L-1 visa you get to work for this one company only - and changing jobs is usually essential to building a good career in tech.

Re: Ask HN: Thinking of moving to Europe from USA

#140

Post by iagooar »

tbarbugli wrote: post #105
iagooar wrote: post #85

I assume you want a career as a software engineer. This is my list: - Berlin: cheap (getting expensive quick, but still cheap for a large city), multicultural (many, many people from all around the world, lots of people speak English, those who don't usually understand you), Germans themselves are very open and interesting as a nation. Berlin has a vibrant startup scene, which is nice for getting your first job as a…

I would not suggest Germany or (german) Switzerland to people that don't speak german.

Why not? Besides UK and Malta, what other non-English speaking country would you recommend? The Netherlands? I don't think the difference is very big and Germany and Switzerland have such great need for skilled engineers, they won't often require German for an IT position.
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