What you ignore is the thing that with meta’s salary you can retire in 10 years back to Europe. With silly wages in Germany you can retire on your 75th birthday. Feel the difference? Germany’s economy is stagnating, there will be no higher salaries anymore. Just higher taxes. If I were younger I would pick SF and hordes of homeless over declining Germany. If you follow political discussions it will not get better: planed VAT increase, retiremeNt and health insurance getting continuously more expensive. Even if I can get 3% yearly salary increase it will be eaten up by rising taxes and inflation making my poorer every year.

I think this reduces to a simple question of preference, but you understand that in order to get those salaries you work around the clock in a work environment so toxic, that there’s several books written about it. There’s a reason why they dev’s can order food and have free laundry service there, and it’s not zuck just loving his employees more. So yeah if you don’t get ill or burnout you get to retire earlier, and then move back to Europe. I’d rather stay in Europe, have spare time, live my life in nicer society and perhaps even make products that help society, or somebody, some way.

As of Germany, I don’t follow currenct politics over there (not a German here, Finnish), but you guys have time and time again show that you can produce pretty much anything for the global markets as well or better than anyone else. Your problems are political, and you are your own worst enemy. Germany has enormous possibilities as a society, if you just get your shit together.

But you would have gotten to live in Germany for those ten years.

SF and Meta make sense if you are going to try to be the cutting edge of conversations and tech.

If you just want to live your life?