[jamesmehaffey]

Weather aside, I really enjoyed living in Amsterdam. It is a crowded and rather small city, but it is a big center for banking and tech. Europe doesn’t really do the sprawling mega cities like the US does, though everything is very well connected. Still though, that headline is a bit overblown.

[javajosh]

The walkability of older European cities cannot be overstated as a huge quality-of-life improvement! Bikability too, which is a big feature of many European cities.

The language issue is real, though. It's probably better, I think, to accept that you can't speak the language, and to give yourself a break learning it. If you like it, and want to learn, and want to be able to deal with banks and mobile providers over the phone (extremely difficult without fluency, and computer translation tools won't help you!), then take a class, and take it slowly.

It's stressful enough to move overseas. My advice is not to add language on top of everything else you have to learn - you are lucky to speak English, so lean into that. (Many people will appreciate practicing their English with a native speaker, too - although some small minority will hate you for it.)

But yeah, don't do what I did and try to do everything at once. It's stressful, exhausting, and you never give yourself a chance to recover, mentally or emotionally, from the stress of learning. Be kind to yourself!

[javajosh]

The money isn't as good, but the benefits are quite a lot better, especially for families. Universal healthcare is an enormous simplification of life (I really wish Americans who get mad about "socialized medicine = evil!" could experience it first hand; its clear there is no such thing as a free market in healthcare anyway). Universal education, even pre-K, is an enormous benefit if you have kids.

But yeah, total comp for devs seem to top out at around 100k, no matter where you are, and usually is more like 50k. (Evidence is anecdotal). Also, since the epicenter of the internet is still the SFBA they wonder why you are in Europe, when all of them want to move to the SFBA! I suspect this last one will start changing.

[secondcoming]

Dutch people generally have pretty much perfect english. Scandinavia too. Urban Germany too. I think the only resistance to speaking english would be from the French. That said, it's only polite to try to learn and speak the local language.

[ChuckNorris89]

Amsterdam is a pretty expensive city(for Europe, I know it's cheap compared to Sf but so is everything else out there). Wow are the median tech salaries there?

[jamesmehaffey]

I suppose the salaries are somewhat comparable if perhaps a little lower, however the cost of living is much less in general compared to SF. The most important thing is that the beer is inexpensive, and the fact that you can spend every weekend in a different city for next to nothing more than makes up for the discrepancy.

[ChuckNorris89]

I wasn't comparing Amsterdam to SF since nothin in Europe comes close to Bay Area, I was saying Amsterdam is expensive compared to most cities in Europe but when I look t wages I don't see anything special than cities in Europe with a lower CoL.