[lawn]

You are however making sweeping generalizations that you extrapolate from your own personal experience, while making hard connections between quality of life and the ability to earn more than your peers.

Meanwhile the Nordics for example consistently rank much higher in health, happiness, and quality of life, despite having lower top wages.

[fooker]

I agree, not sure what the generalization was.

My point was that if you have a senior level big tech job in the US, it makes zero sense to move to Europe unless you have family there or want to make a significant financial sacrifice.

Obviously Europe wins for workers in general, and if I wanted to work in a car factory’s yes I’d do my best to work in Europe.

[dh2022]

I looked at your other posts in this thread. The lifestyle you describe is not the average US based developer lifestyle. You must live in a very selective circle. Because I only know one developer who owned his plane-that Canadian guy who literally coded the first version of S3, became irreplaceable so AWS let him move to Oregon and he was commuting by plane. And I only know one developer who owned horses-he actually made his money by buying a whole bunch of land in Kirkland in the 90s. These are the only two examples out of probably more than 100 developers I worked with.

I know developers who have motor bikes and a Porsche or BMW or, recently, Teslas that sometimes they take to the race track. But this lifestyle is common for EU devs as well.

[fooker]

Yes, you are right.

I am not sure why everyone keeps bringing up the average though.

You have to decide whether it makes sense for you to be somewhere, based on how much you can expect to make and what your quality of life will be.

What the average person makes does not matter except in an abstract sense that equitable societies are better in general (which is absolutely true).

> You must live in a very selective circle. > These are the only two examples out of probably more than 100 developers I worked with.

People can be very careful about keeping professional life separate. There is a boat owners club in a marina I frequent, the vast majority of the members (out of about 200) are techies, it's a common hobby.

I know several that have a pilot license but only one who bought a plane, it's somewhat convenient to just rent every few months.

[dh2022]

What I meant to say is that the lifestyle of the average US dev is not that much better than the lifestyle of the average EU dev. From the examples you gave I only recognized the racing and boating lifestyles - both of which are accessible to EU devs. The planes and horses… not so much.

[fooker]

Now think of a more specific category - big tech employees with 5+ years of experience.

There are a bunch more expensive hobbies, about half of the developers I know (personally outside of work environments) have one or more.

Planes came up because I am getting started with the training for it, horses because my friend has a farm with horses twenty minutes from a major city.