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If you don't mind, please share your home country name and where did you move to.
I've now been working in Chinese tech for six years. Liking it and probably staying. Job market is hot but as a foreigner your options are fewer and speaking Mandarin is growing in importance year by year.
Getting a job was easy by local standards due to a tight local market for programmers. Getting through German classes to earn the permanent residency was the toughest part.
I would never consider moving back to the USA. I was always a sceptic of the 'Greatest country on Earth' rhetoric. But now that I've lived in a functioning society for 10 years, it's clear to me that the USA is basically a "3rd world" country.
EDIT: I'm using "3rd world" here for lack of a better term indicating general decline and emmiseration.
We looked for countries that would take us that had a good political alignment, a decent social security system, and a thriving tech ecosystem. We ended up with Canada, Ireland, and Germany. We selected Toronto even though I am a Hungarian citizen and that would have made Europe a lot easier.
My wife and I applied using Canada’s points system, something mine and mostly hers post-grad work impacted positively. My wife would continue her studies and I’d go along and work remotely. She had everything set up and we’d move the next semester.
Then, out of the blue, I was pinged by an Irish recruiter and now we live in Dublin. Ireland is much nicer than either of us suspected and while the government is slightly to the right, labor law and public healthcare are sensible, and the voting system weeds out extremes such as the Trumps, Bolsonaros and Orbans that made some countries so undesirable.
Here's a post I wrote many years later now that we are the most awarded global startup in Seoul - https://www.jacobjacquet.com/blog/building-a-global-startup-...
Average quality of life in the nordics is massively better than the uk. It’s not even close!
Wages are lower in absolute terms but not qualitatively and we probably couldn’t afford to move back to the uk and have any semblance of same standard of living. We are now trapped in a utopia and happy about it.
More than half of programmers here are immigrants. Shop staff happily talk good English. There really isn’t any barriers finding good work.
Finding a job was not easy and many companies didn’t support relocation, though Berlin was still cheap then. Coming from the USA also helped me as I found people in EU tend to have favourable opinion about US Americans. It was not easy to integrate in the society and I had to work hard to learn the language and culture. Living in expat bubble is the worst way to live in a foreign land.
I’m now well integrated in the society and I feel that Berlin is home for me now.
I didn’t have any plans to emigrate until my friend introduced me to a small company in Japan that was looking for an engineer.
I applied, but was rejected, so I thought that was that. Then a few months later I got another email. Their initial hire didn’t work out and now they wanted me to join.
I worked remote for about a month while we got the visa process sorted (apparently they needed my actual bachelor diploma in Japan to issue one, so sending that and getting it back was a fun exercise).
Then I moved to Japan. I hadn’t been further than like 1 country over from my home ever before.
To be honest, it wasn’t quite as different as I expected it to be. I didn’t speak the language at all, but western civilization is oddly similar even if the details are different.
After 9 months I was tired of life without my friends, so I said I’ll work remote, and moved back to the Netherlands.
That didn’t quite work out either. While being back was nice, apartments in the Netherlands are expensive (and I wasn’t making so much), so I ended up living with my parents. I’d also grown used to a lot of little conveniences Japan has, and it all added up.
It took me only 4 or 5 months to move back to Japan. I quickly made new friends, and I’ve spent a very happy 8 years here now.
At this point it’s hard to justify moving back because there are no similarly well compensated IC positions in the Netherlands.