> I question whether I'm wasting my prime earning years (comp.Engineer) Gonna be brutally honest. I think you are. Fellow Indian here, also came on H1-B to US,

> I question whether I'm wasting my prime earning years (comp.Engineer) Gonna be brutally honest. I think you are. Fellow Indian here, also came on H1-B to US, survived 5 layoffs in 2 companies over a 10 month period in the .COM boom and bust. Many of my fellow engineers, waay smarter than me, were not so fortunate. Some went back to India, others found jobs in UK and rest of Europe. Your complains are what I hear from them even now. Your comps ( #s ) also check out. I run http://www.visaok.in http://www.visaok.in and routinely find that jobs in Denmark, Germany, UK and couple of other countries pay about 40% to 50% less than the same in US for the same job title and similar description. Most professions have a prime and a software engineer's career, IMO, peaks at around late 30s or early 40s in terms of the base salary and compensation. I've found the range for a Sr. Software Engineer in a non-Silicon Valley / FAANG company to top around 150K to 170K in San Francisco / Bay Area. If you are average in terms of abilities, you can easily get a Software Engineer job at the IT department of a medium to large corp here in San Francisco for about 110K to 140K. Grow from there. I would say try to come back to US on an H1B or any other Visa. Try to tell yourself you are here temporarily, and that you can always go back to Denmark as a fall back, or after you've peaked here and want to settle down and work towards FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early). This may be a harder sell if you are married to a European and went there for that reason. Most western women, I found from experience, always want to move back to their home town after marriage, even if it's a bone chilling place like Siberia or Wisconsin or Alaska.