7 ms·

> Me personally, I dont even think I'll be reaching retirement age if I continue to live in the UK, and thats not through not wanting to work, but thats because

> Me personally, I dont even think I'll be reaching retirement age if I continue to live in the UK, and thats not through not wanting to work, but thats because of the how the UK has become. Everything has just got too expensive living in the UK now. Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?). Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT. It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US [0]. [0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-brain-trade http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...

angarg12 3y ago
I'm a relatively new immigrant to the US, Seattle area, spaniard but moved from the UK. I'm actually extremely tempted to move back to Spain and my experience in the US so far has been very negative. Very high cost of living, inflation, uncertainty due to layoffs, salaries down due to a combination of lack of raises and stocks going down, housing price still increasing despite the high interest rates, which have made real estate even more unaffordable. To top things up the green card priority dates for my immigrant class have gone back, so I have even more uncertainty of when I will achieve permanent resident status. I don't know the circumstances of the people that you describe, but Europe is looking way more attractive than the US. The whole reason why I left Spain was lack of jobs and low salaries, but Covid and remote seem to have incredibly improved the situation (I know from second hand accounts). The only reason I'm holding on is a combination of sunken cost fallacy and an unjustified optimism in the future. It took me years and tons of effort to move my family to this country, so I'm not ready to give up just yet. I'm also aware than my bad experience is in part due to random circumstances, and if the situation improves (both for me personally, and for the country as a whole) my experience will be different. Still, I give it a 50%/50% chance that in 3 years I will hate my situation here, give up and move back home.
- totallywrong 3y ago
  If you're open to it I feel like the sweet spot right now, specially for Spanish speakers, is to work remotely from somewhere in LATAM, earning in dollars or euros and spending in local currency.
  - throw_nbvc1234 3y ago
    "inequality is bad for you so go move someplace where you can contribute to making inequality even worse for the locals"
    - totallywrong 3y ago
      How is it bad to bring foreign money into a country and spend it on the local economy?
      - howLongHowLong 3y ago
        For one, because if there are enough people to pay higher prices, the market will reflect that and the locals will have to deal with the new costs despite the fact that there are no local jobs paying enough to afford these things. So yeah for people who are already merchants (likely a minority) it's great; everyone else gets poorer. Thus, inequality increases. This is already playing out in US cities.
        totallywrong 3y ago
        I won't pretend to know about this stuff. What I can tell you is that, since covid and the advent of remote work, so many countries have been rushing to launch some sort of "digital nomad" visa, precisely to attract this new type of worker. So clearly they've determined the model to be a net positive for the economy.
        nmeta 3y ago
        I cannot pretend to have an adequate breadth of geopolitical knowledge on this topic nor an understanding of the underlying reasons behind the various governments and the advent more recent "nomad visas". However my knee-jerk reaction is that, the various programs governments will incentivize regarding foreign investment and relocation are not necessarily in the best economic or social interests of the locals for a given area, despite that governments intent. One story I recall from earlier this year was regarding Lisbon and the backlash against their visa [1]. From the article it's obvious there were other (tax) incentives that existed prior to the nomad visa, however it appears to me that the visa was a turning point in public discourse on the topic, as it incentivized highly paid individuals to relocate to Lisbon (4x the average Portuguese salary). Though I don't disagree that it could still have been weighed by the government and determined it to be a net-positive still. [1] : https://www.politico.eu/article/portugal-digital-nomads-bubble-gentrification/ https://www.politico.eu/article/portugal-digital-nomads-bubb...
Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
The UK shot itself in the foot hard with Brexit, and has become a quite undesirable place for many for that reason. Doesn't mean that the US is necessarily doing great.
- adventured 3y ago
  Which part of the US? It's so dramatically different from city to city, state to state. Software developer or equivalent income capable tech job, remote, university city/town. It's a fairly easy set-up (unless you're already very rooted somewhere). They're relatively inexpensive to live in (you can actually buy a real house at $100k per year!), and there are tons of safe choices (specifically with a low murder rate). Primary downside is far weaker food/nightlife/etc. vs what you get in major cities.
- Lacerda69 3y ago
  I still dont get why they did it. To me it was the most stupid thing any country did in my lifetime and am still mad about it.
  - bugglebeetle 3y ago
    Because reactionaries successfully channeled discontent about declining material conditions into a reductive scapegoating of the EU and faced no meaningful opposition from what is now a center-right Labor Party, post Blair.
    - lovemenot 3y ago
      >> Because reactionaries successfully channeled discontent about declining material conditions into a reductive scapegoating of the EU and faced no meaningful opposition Yes. From the Left as well as the Right. Jeremy Corbyn is an example of the former. >> ... from what is now a center-right Labor Party, post Blair. Labour Party. It seems traditional party politics were not the primary factor. There were Leavers on both Left and Right. Centrists were less likely to be Leavers than those on the wings of their party. Demographic factors were more determining of a Leave vote than political affiliation: Age (older vs younger), region (England/Wales vs Scotland/N.Ireland), population density (rural vs urban), income (low earning vs high earning)
c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
>Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. Anecdotally, as an American expat in SE Asia and Australia for the past 14 years, I've NEVER met a British expat who's keen to return. Tax, crime, weather, etc.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Arn_Thor 3y ago
  Quite a self-selecting sample, though. Presumably most of the ones that did feel strongly that they wanted to return would have done so
LudwigNagasena 3y ago
Where have you heard all that stuff? At pro-immigration pitches before elections? What is this hostility towards top foreign AI talent someone supposedly has to be afraid of?
ecshafer 3y ago
The 2016 predictions were political and not based on reality. Changing H1B rules to make income requirements stricter isn't exactly "hostile to foreign talent". top talent will go to the US as long as it pays the best with the most opportunities.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  I agree that the 2016 predictions were political but the underfunding of USCIS and the insane backlogs have started to have an impact on our R&D pipeline, though none of this is going to other European countries - the talent is returning to India and China instead. Anecdotally, a very good friend of mine who's an Indian national did his BS and PhD in EE (specifically in VLSI and Semiconductors) from a Tier 1 program (ie. Cal, MIT, Stanford, UIUC) and was working with a major Semiconductor company. His F-1 wasn't converted to H1B (or his O-1 app was messed up) so now he's heading back to India with a chip on his shoulder and 10+ years of experience in a technology we are trying to regain expertise in. This same story happened with Chinese immigrants 10-15 years ago, with the 2008 recession causing a number of Chinese nationals to lose work sponsorship and thus return to China. A lot of those guys ended up founding major startups, becoming professors at top Chinese institutions, and advisors to the Government there.
bedobi 3y ago
Problem with Commonwealth countries are * while salaries are higher than eg most of Europe, they're still nowhere near the US - US salaries are often at least double (or more, a lot more) * their cost of living and taxes are high * they're backwards and insular (maybe you think the US is too, but the US has 350 million people, Australia has like 25, lol, so insular takes on a whole new meaning there) * they're not as diverse as the US (sure, London is diverse, but still, the diversity of the US smokes them all, so many different cities here with so many different demographics, climates etc etc) I'm saying that as a Scandi who's lived in UK, Canada, Australia and now US. Of course the US has a lot of problems too, but as a destination for skilled immigrants, the others don't even compare IMO.
- XorNot 3y ago
  > they're backwards and insular Care to expand on this?
  - bedobi 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - jclulow 3y ago
      I'm Australian and though I don't live there now, I did for 27 years. Most of the things you're describing are just a function of the people you were hanging out with. I knew people like that, and I chose different friends. People definitely used gay as a slur when I was in high school, and then people grew out of it because it was childish and awful. Perhaps it was at about the time that some of us came out as gay. Diversity is certainly not uniform in the country, obviously, and exposure is a critical part of being well rounded. We had a lot of people from PNG and Sri Lanka where I grew up, and when I went to Uni there were a lot of foreign students from Kenya and other places. Being weird or racist about it would have been pretty fucking unacceptable to me and my friends. But I have met people who are indeed weirdly racist or sexist. Also, I have noticed a pretty broad shift in this from people in my parents generation to people in my generation, and I'm sure again to people younger than myself. I think this actually happening in lots of places though, not just Australia. As far as swearing goes... Yes? We swear a lot. It works for us! We have lots of problems, and a truly horrendous history of colonial violence -- which we have at least begun to address in history class in schools in the last thirty years. Lots more work to do. I'm sorry you had a bad go of it, but please don't assume that you have a picture of every Australian.
smcin 3y ago
Montréal and Toronto have become hubs for AI. That prediction was reasonably accurate. You need to distinguish between which education systems produce people who innovate, vs which countries' capital markets companies get floated on. Compared to the US, the EU doesn't have any large cohesive stock market. We will soon see how differing national attitudes to strong/weak regulation on AI (vs say data privacy) decide where the investor money goes; just like how national energy and regulatory policy on crypto mining in the last 5 years decided where mining moved to. There's lots of fashionable chatter about AI regulation, but I'm going to predict that there isn't anything like even a weak transnational treaty, meanwhile the 2024(/25) US/UK/Canada elections will see AI-driven exploits pushing the limits. And the UK is now chasing the tail end of the crypto boom with a promise to have weaker regulation. [0] [0]: Prof G Markets: ... Andreessen Horowitz’s London Office https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPVQPAb6_Ic&t=25m47s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPVQPAb6_Ic&t=25m47s
- 908B64B197 3y ago
  Montreal yes. Toronto I'm not so sure. Few years ago we acquired something in Montreal related to AI, and it's interesting because when we tried to get the team to relocate to California many weren't interested. A lot of the key personnel ended-up moving, but they still kept a significant presence in the city. Even today, when hiring they'll have engineers indicate early in the process they won't ever move (despite pretty much everyone considered for that office being eligible for an O-1 due to the nature of the work being done there). What's interesting is we opened a satellite location in Toronto and it was a completely different experience. First thing people asked coming into interviews was about relocating to the US and if we could sponsor their visa. The demographics also skewed heavily toward recent immigrants to Canada. The irony was, the Toronto location was opened specifically to house developers that simply couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration.

angarg12 3y ago

I'm a relatively new immigrant to the US, Seattle area, spaniard but moved from the UK. I'm actually extremely tempted to move back to Spain and my experience in the US so far has been very negative. Very high cost of living, inflation, uncertainty due to layoffs, salaries down due to a combination of lack of raises and stocks going down, housing price still increasing despite the high interest rates, which have made real estate even more unaffordable. To top things up the green card priority dates for my immigrant class have gone back, so I have even more uncertainty of when I will achieve permanent resident status. I don't know the circumstances of the people that you describe, but Europe is looking way more attractive than the US. The whole reason why I left Spain was lack of jobs and low salaries, but Covid and remote seem to have incredibly improved the situation (I know from second hand accounts). The only reason I'm holding on is a combination of sunken cost fallacy and an unjustified optimism in the future. It took me years and tons of effort to move my family to this country, so I'm not ready to give up just yet. I'm also aware than my bad experience is in part due to random circumstances, and if the situation improves (both for me personally, and for the country as a whole) my experience will be different. Still, I give it a 50%/50% chance that in 3 years I will hate my situation here, give up and move back home.

totallywrong 3y ago
If you're open to it I feel like the sweet spot right now, specially for Spanish speakers, is to work remotely from somewhere in LATAM, earning in dollars or euros and spending in local currency.
- throw_nbvc1234 3y ago
  "inequality is bad for you so go move someplace where you can contribute to making inequality even worse for the locals"
  - totallywrong 3y ago
    How is it bad to bring foreign money into a country and spend it on the local economy?
    - howLongHowLong 3y ago
      For one, because if there are enough people to pay higher prices, the market will reflect that and the locals will have to deal with the new costs despite the fact that there are no local jobs paying enough to afford these things. So yeah for people who are already merchants (likely a minority) it's great; everyone else gets poorer. Thus, inequality increases. This is already playing out in US cities.
      - totallywrong 3y ago
        I won't pretend to know about this stuff. What I can tell you is that, since covid and the advent of remote work, so many countries have been rushing to launch some sort of "digital nomad" visa, precisely to attract this new type of worker. So clearly they've determined the model to be a net positive for the economy.
        nmeta 3y ago
        I cannot pretend to have an adequate breadth of geopolitical knowledge on this topic nor an understanding of the underlying reasons behind the various governments and the advent more recent "nomad visas". However my knee-jerk reaction is that, the various programs governments will incentivize regarding foreign investment and relocation are not necessarily in the best economic or social interests of the locals for a given area, despite that governments intent. One story I recall from earlier this year was regarding Lisbon and the backlash against their visa [1]. From the article it's obvious there were other (tax) incentives that existed prior to the nomad visa, however it appears to me that the visa was a turning point in public discourse on the topic, as it incentivized highly paid individuals to relocate to Lisbon (4x the average Portuguese salary). Though I don't disagree that it could still have been weighed by the government and determined it to be a net-positive still. [1] : https://www.politico.eu/article/portugal-digital-nomads-bubble-gentrification/ https://www.politico.eu/article/portugal-digital-nomads-bubb...

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago

The UK shot itself in the foot hard with Brexit, and has become a quite undesirable place for many for that reason. Doesn't mean that the US is necessarily doing great.

adventured 3y ago
Which part of the US? It's so dramatically different from city to city, state to state. Software developer or equivalent income capable tech job, remote, university city/town. It's a fairly easy set-up (unless you're already very rooted somewhere). They're relatively inexpensive to live in (you can actually buy a real house at $100k per year!), and there are tons of safe choices (specifically with a low murder rate). Primary downside is far weaker food/nightlife/etc. vs what you get in major cities.
Lacerda69 3y ago
I still dont get why they did it. To me it was the most stupid thing any country did in my lifetime and am still mad about it.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  Because reactionaries successfully channeled discontent about declining material conditions into a reductive scapegoating of the EU and faced no meaningful opposition from what is now a center-right Labor Party, post Blair.
  - lovemenot 3y ago
    >> Because reactionaries successfully channeled discontent about declining material conditions into a reductive scapegoating of the EU and faced no meaningful opposition Yes. From the Left as well as the Right. Jeremy Corbyn is an example of the former. >> ... from what is now a center-right Labor Party, post Blair. Labour Party. It seems traditional party politics were not the primary factor. There were Leavers on both Left and Right. Centrists were less likely to be Leavers than those on the wings of their party. Demographic factors were more determining of a Leave vote than political affiliation: Age (older vs younger), region (England/Wales vs Scotland/N.Ireland), population density (rural vs urban), income (low earning vs high earning)

c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago

>Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. Anecdotally, as an American expat in SE Asia and Australia for the past 14 years, I've NEVER met a British expat who's keen to return. Tax, crime, weather, etc.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Arn_Thor 3y ago
Quite a self-selecting sample, though. Presumably most of the ones that did feel strongly that they wanted to return would have done so

LudwigNagasena 3y ago

Where have you heard all that stuff? At pro-immigration pitches before elections? What is this hostility towards top foreign AI talent someone supposedly has to be afraid of?

ecshafer 3y ago

The 2016 predictions were political and not based on reality. Changing H1B rules to make income requirements stricter isn't exactly "hostile to foreign talent". top talent will go to the US as long as it pays the best with the most opportunities.

alephnerd 3y ago
I agree that the 2016 predictions were political but the underfunding of USCIS and the insane backlogs have started to have an impact on our R&D pipeline, though none of this is going to other European countries - the talent is returning to India and China instead. Anecdotally, a very good friend of mine who's an Indian national did his BS and PhD in EE (specifically in VLSI and Semiconductors) from a Tier 1 program (ie. Cal, MIT, Stanford, UIUC) and was working with a major Semiconductor company. His F-1 wasn't converted to H1B (or his O-1 app was messed up) so now he's heading back to India with a chip on his shoulder and 10+ years of experience in a technology we are trying to regain expertise in. This same story happened with Chinese immigrants 10-15 years ago, with the 2008 recession causing a number of Chinese nationals to lose work sponsorship and thus return to China. A lot of those guys ended up founding major startups, becoming professors at top Chinese institutions, and advisors to the Government there.

bedobi 3y ago

Problem with Commonwealth countries are * while salaries are higher than eg most of Europe, they're still nowhere near the US - US salaries are often at least double (or more, a lot more) * their cost of living and taxes are high * they're backwards and insular (maybe you think the US is too, but the US has 350 million people, Australia has like 25, lol, so insular takes on a whole new meaning there) * they're not as diverse as the US (sure, London is diverse, but still, the diversity of the US smokes them all, so many different cities here with so many different demographics, climates etc etc) I'm saying that as a Scandi who's lived in UK, Canada, Australia and now US. Of course the US has a lot of problems too, but as a destination for skilled immigrants, the others don't even compare IMO.

XorNot 3y ago
> they're backwards and insular Care to expand on this?
- bedobi 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - jclulow 3y ago
    I'm Australian and though I don't live there now, I did for 27 years. Most of the things you're describing are just a function of the people you were hanging out with. I knew people like that, and I chose different friends. People definitely used gay as a slur when I was in high school, and then people grew out of it because it was childish and awful. Perhaps it was at about the time that some of us came out as gay. Diversity is certainly not uniform in the country, obviously, and exposure is a critical part of being well rounded. We had a lot of people from PNG and Sri Lanka where I grew up, and when I went to Uni there were a lot of foreign students from Kenya and other places. Being weird or racist about it would have been pretty fucking unacceptable to me and my friends. But I have met people who are indeed weirdly racist or sexist. Also, I have noticed a pretty broad shift in this from people in my parents generation to people in my generation, and I'm sure again to people younger than myself. I think this actually happening in lots of places though, not just Australia. As far as swearing goes... Yes? We swear a lot. It works for us! We have lots of problems, and a truly horrendous history of colonial violence -- which we have at least begun to address in history class in schools in the last thirty years. Lots more work to do. I'm sorry you had a bad go of it, but please don't assume that you have a picture of every Australian.

smcin 3y ago

Montréal and Toronto have become hubs for AI. That prediction was reasonably accurate. You need to distinguish between which education systems produce people who innovate, vs which countries' capital markets companies get floated on. Compared to the US, the EU doesn't have any large cohesive stock market. We will soon see how differing national attitudes to strong/weak regulation on AI (vs say data privacy) decide where the investor money goes; just like how national energy and regulatory policy on crypto mining in the last 5 years decided where mining moved to. There's lots of fashionable chatter about AI regulation, but I'm going to predict that there isn't anything like even a weak transnational treaty, meanwhile the 2024(/25) US/UK/Canada elections will see AI-driven exploits pushing the limits. And the UK is now chasing the tail end of the crypto boom with a promise to have weaker regulation. [0] [0]: Prof G Markets: ... Andreessen Horowitz’s London Office https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPVQPAb6_Ic&t=25m47s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPVQPAb6_Ic&t=25m47s

908B64B197 3y ago
Montreal yes. Toronto I'm not so sure. Few years ago we acquired something in Montreal related to AI, and it's interesting because when we tried to get the team to relocate to California many weren't interested. A lot of the key personnel ended-up moving, but they still kept a significant presence in the city. Even today, when hiring they'll have engineers indicate early in the process they won't ever move (despite pretty much everyone considered for that office being eligible for an O-1 due to the nature of the work being done there). What's interesting is we opened a satellite location in Toronto and it was a completely different experience. First thing people asked coming into interviews was about relocating to the US and if we could sponsor their visa. The demographics also skewed heavily toward recent immigrants to Canada. The irony was, the Toronto location was opened specifically to house developers that simply couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration.