New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Am I wasting my time working as a software engineer in Western Europe?

Ask HN: Am I wasting my time working as a software engineer in Western Europe?
12 by dakiol | 4 comments on Hacker News.
- bachelor and master degree in computer science - around 8 years of experience - pretty average developer (can deal with Ansible, the command line, MySQL, Go, Vue, and tons of other toys; can talk about Turing machines, the pumping lemma, CORS, or about the sudoers file) - pretty average guy to work with - earning around 75K Euro (gross) per year as an employee (30 to 40 hours per week). 30 days vacation per year (plus public holiday) - currently, sort of "tech lead" within my team I cannot complain about my current lifestyle, but I see that I'm approaching the "glass ceiling" for software engineers in Europe (I don't see myself ever earning more than 100K Euro as a simple software engineer) and I cannot help but think: why on earth I don't quit my job and work for an American company from Europe? I would be doing basically the same but from starters I would be making double (avg. of 150K USD/year according to Google) but more importantly, the "glass ceiling" in USA is above 150K USD. Even after taxes and health insurance, the net amount each month is way higher with a American salary. The more I think about it, the more stupid seems my current situation. I think the main thing that's holding me back is that I would probably need to work as a contractor instead of an employee, and this is something I've never done before.

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