311–320 of 538 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it common for Germans to dream about getting out of Germany and moving to US? Congratulations to you that you managed to do that, I am wondering how hard for German is to migrate to US to puruse better life here.
Most Germans I know in tech (lived in Germany for 5 years or so) would never want to move the US. Everyone prefers the Germany social security/insurance/pension system (even if it’s quite mediocre compared to The Netherlands and Scandinavia).
And yet GP did, and others more like him. FWIW I had two German bosses who emigrated to the US(one to California, one to Atlanta), so the US is clearly an attractive place for them and they say they loved it there just like GP.
The majority of Germans talking about how much they hate the US, have never lived there but they hate it nevertheless because it's a populat thing to hate in Germany, and also they don't work in tech, or need to rely on the welfare state, or are already from well off families where the lower local salaries make no difference. The ones working in tech who don't rely on the welfare state, are quite open to the idea of moving there for the right money.
Sure, if GP was one of those Germans from a mid-upper class background with a nice inherited Bavarian house (unaffordable at any German working wage) then immigrating to the US makes no sense as he already would have enough prosperity at home, but if you have no wealth and want to build it, then working in the US tech sector is much better than working in Germany.
So no, a blanket generalization cannot be made of "Germans wanting to move to the US", as that highly depends on their social/wealth class and career.
Edit: seems I upset the apple cart with my comment. Sorry, next time I'm gonna parrot the HN accepted "Germany-Good, US-Bad" party line if that pleases the crowd.
Back in 2002 I lost my job during a regional financial crisis (I’m from Uruguay). I was working at a bank (as a contractors) and some coworkers and I were working on a HA project for MySQL at the moment (to use it at work). Once I got laid off, I focused on it to the point that it became quite useful, and at some point, someone from Israel reached out with questions. I answered with a lot of delay, and when I explain…
There's this fun question "if you could change one thing from the past...", and I don't know how to answer it truthfully, because we are the sum of everything in our past, the good and the bad, and I like where I am today... but man, that crisis was rough.
This knowledge and quick demos I was able to do because of it enabled me to get multiple client projects.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it common for Germans to dream about getting out of Germany and moving to US? Congratulations to you that you managed to do that, I am wondering how hard for German is to migrate to US to puruse better life here.
Most Germans I know in tech (lived in Germany for 5 years or so) would never want to move the US. Everyone prefers the Germany social security/insurance/pension system (even if it’s quite mediocre compared to The Netherlands and Scandinavia).
I’m not German but French, however I do feel that this "Silicon Valley dream" upon developers was still existing in this era.
It was at that time that we started to have startups in Europe who tried to follow the SV culture. GAFAMs were still seen as cool enough to envy a well paid job at them. A lot of SV startups weren’t openly privacy hostile (or maybe the issue wasn’t took seriously enough).
But I felt that this "dream" was only upon developers at that time and it stoped sometimes after. In fact, in 2015, while on a trip to SF, I ate with a former French coworker who decided to live the dream and he was already saying to me that he wanted to come back in Europe because he couldn’t stand the ambiant culture anymore.
It wasn’t the job, he loved it, performed well, was well paid. It wasn’t even the people, he made some friends there, felt like people were genuinely nice.
But it was more the delusion about the SV-Life and the mismatch in cultural values and in the global society lifestyle in which he felt you were nothing to others / to the society without money.
Now I do feel like that this sentiment about the US is now more mainstream in Europe even amongst those who never came in USA.
ps : I urge you to not read any criticism in my comment, I’m describing a general sentiment from the other side of an ocean, probably with a big bias. But I do feel this sentiment is pretty recent and it’s probable that Trump made it way worse.
Among all these feel-good stories, how about one with a bit different ending? During my masters, I created a ML library that dealt with noise in dataset [1]. I implemented bunch of papers, but unlike your usual research code, I spent a long time obsessing about it's API, performance, created documentation, CI- the whole shebang. But then, like avg research code, I moved on and promptly forgot about it. One day about…
(i dont want to be too specific but it was a website to help people make purchasing decisions for a specific thing in an interactive way and made tons off referral links)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most Germans I know in tech (lived in Germany for 5 years or so) would never want to move the US. Everyone prefers the Germany social security/insurance/pension system (even if it’s quite mediocre compared to The Netherlands and Scandinavia).
OP’s story is from 2014-2015. I’m not German but French, however I do feel that this "Silicon Valley dream" upon developers was still existing in this era. It was at that time that we started to have startups in Europe who tried to follow the SV culture. GAFAMs were still seen as cool enough to envy a well paid job at them. A lot of SV startups weren’t openly privacy hostile (or maybe the issue wasn’t took seriously…