You should compare by salary minus cost of living instead of just by salary alone, almost most places will be way lower than SF in terms of salary.
Another thing to consider is work policies and overall lifestyle of the people there and see if you are compatible. For instance it’s generally not ok to talk about work outside of work in the Netherlands, so if you are a workaholic it would cause some issues.
I went into this deeper in another response and having triple the salary while having a much lower effective tax rate is almost impossible to make up for. Not to mention I’d want to live in a big city if I did move which would make the cost of living a lot closer.
A lot of places put SF at 40% higher cost of living than Berlin, but the prices they list for things here are way too high. Assuming the numbers are high for Berlin too triple the salary with lower taxes easily beats the measly 40% cost of living increase. I’m sure engineers in Germany have a comfortable life, but the math doesn’t work out in my favor.
As for lifestyles my friends and I almost never talk about work either as we very much want to leave work at work. I probably average 30 hours as do many of my friends so it’s not like we’re grinding. Just trying to do our time and leave.
You should compare by salary minus cost of living instead of just by salary alone, almost most places will be way lower than SF in terms of salary.
Another thing to consider is work policies and overall lifestyle of the people there and see if you are compatible. For instance it’s generally not ok to talk about work outside of work in the Netherlands, so if you are a workaholic it would cause some issues.
I went into this deeper in another response and having triple the salary while having a much lower effective tax rate is almost impossible to make up for. Not to mention I’d want to live in a big city if I did move which would make the cost of living a lot closer.
A lot of places put SF at 40% higher cost of living than Berlin, but the prices they list for things here are way too high. Assuming the numbers are high for Berlin too triple the salary with lower taxes easily beats the measly 40% cost of living increase. I’m sure engineers in Germany have a comfortable life, but the math doesn’t work out in my favor.
As for lifestyles my friends and I almost never talk about work either as we very much want to leave work at work. I probably average 30 hours as do many of my friends so it’s not like we’re grinding. Just trying to do our time and leave.